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A review by dorinlazar
Flag in Exile by David Weber
2.0
There are two things happening in this story, and both of them are taking a long time to build up. First of all, Honor goes into exile, starts a new business building domes on Grayson, and everyone hates her for that except the people. At the same time, the French... I mean Haven attack two different systems so that they can attack Grayson without scouting first.
Since some religious nuts want to discredit and kill Harrington and they are fine with killing a ton of people, including some children. Funny enough, the author chooses to get rid of her bodyguards in a similar manner, probably bored with the concept that he created for the steadholder. I wonder if he'll remember that the steadholder *has* to have a bodyguard in the next book. Looking at the name, it looks like he doesn't.
Ok, so, the religious nuts take their sweet time, and try to kill her just a few seconds before the French attack. This is seriously slow-paced stuff, I mean the author fills a lot of pages with what he calls suspense and what I call complete boredom. The point of view of Haven is absolutely useless, it would've been a lot better to simply discard that insight in the mind of the Havenite fleet. Also, they are bad at scouting and information gathering.
When it comes to battles, Weber is obsessed with tonnage, klicks and gs and other things that are simply a bore to read. The final quarter of the book can be summed as „religious nuts try to kill Honor, they kill the high priest instead, Honor cuts the head of a guy, then she leads a fight where she's badly hurt, and quotes Clausewitz to justify a game of chicken”. By now, Honor is a casual killer, but hey, tradition and shit.
It's kind of a mess of a book, but honestly? It's a natural continuation of what Weber wrote so far, so I can't really hold it against him. The character is fine, but seriously, Weber writes himself in corners and he's bad at avoiding them. By now, Honor is the kick-ass-est officer in any fleet she goes in, and really, there's no place to climb. In book 1 she was a newly-minted captain, in book 5 she's an admiral of the fleet (albeit, a foreign fleet). That's a tough spot to be in. He still wrote at least 10 more books after this one.
The same goes for religious sentiment, and the quotation of that silly thing where „people killed themselves more in the name of religion”. No, they didn't. Caesar didn't go genocidal in the name of religion. Neither has Gengis-Khan. Nor Hitler. Nor Stalin. Anyway, Weber is an American and there's all kind of nuts there - he wrote this while the FBI was fighting at Waco, and finished it right before the Oklahoma bombings, so he gets a free pass for his short-sighted view on religion.
All in all, a mediocre book. Stuff happens, people get killed. The end.
Since some religious nuts want to discredit and kill Harrington and they are fine with killing a ton of people, including some children. Funny enough, the author chooses to get rid of her bodyguards in a similar manner, probably bored with the concept that he created for the steadholder. I wonder if he'll remember that the steadholder *has* to have a bodyguard in the next book. Looking at the name, it looks like he doesn't.
Ok, so, the religious nuts take their sweet time, and try to kill her just a few seconds before the French attack. This is seriously slow-paced stuff, I mean the author fills a lot of pages with what he calls suspense and what I call complete boredom. The point of view of Haven is absolutely useless, it would've been a lot better to simply discard that insight in the mind of the Havenite fleet. Also, they are bad at scouting and information gathering.
When it comes to battles, Weber is obsessed with tonnage, klicks and gs and other things that are simply a bore to read. The final quarter of the book can be summed as „religious nuts try to kill Honor, they kill the high priest instead, Honor cuts the head of a guy, then she leads a fight where she's badly hurt, and quotes Clausewitz to justify a game of chicken”. By now, Honor is a casual killer, but hey, tradition and shit.
It's kind of a mess of a book, but honestly? It's a natural continuation of what Weber wrote so far, so I can't really hold it against him. The character is fine, but seriously, Weber writes himself in corners and he's bad at avoiding them. By now, Honor is the kick-ass-est officer in any fleet she goes in, and really, there's no place to climb. In book 1 she was a newly-minted captain, in book 5 she's an admiral of the fleet (albeit, a foreign fleet). That's a tough spot to be in. He still wrote at least 10 more books after this one.
The same goes for religious sentiment, and the quotation of that silly thing where „people killed themselves more in the name of religion”. No, they didn't. Caesar didn't go genocidal in the name of religion. Neither has Gengis-Khan. Nor Hitler. Nor Stalin. Anyway, Weber is an American and there's all kind of nuts there - he wrote this while the FBI was fighting at Waco, and finished it right before the Oklahoma bombings, so he gets a free pass for his short-sighted view on religion.
All in all, a mediocre book. Stuff happens, people get killed. The end.