A review by revbeckett
Halo: Contact Harvest by Joseph Staten

adventurous dark tense fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Sergeant Johnson’s origin story! What can be more exciting than that? If you’re like me and you want to read the Halo books in chronological order, there’s a couple ways you could do it at this point in the timeline. You can either read The Fall of Reach up through chapter 14, then read Contact Harvest, The Cole Protocol, the Battle Born duology, and then finish The Fall of Reach. Or you could do my preferred method: Contact Harvest first, then The Cole Protocol, the Battle Born duology, and then The Fall of Reach especially because a certain Forerunner relic makes an appearance that was first mentioned in the previous chronological book: Broken Circle, and other appearances in The Fall of Reach after their first mention in Contact Harvest. You could also just read all of The Fall of Reach first and then read the others. It doesn’t really matter. The Fall of Reach mentions what happens at Harvest and Admiral Preston Cole in passing, whom the protocol is named after, so you could just read The Fall of Reach and then those two books and the duology for backstory. It’s up to you. 

 

Anyway, besides Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson’s origin story, this is also the story of Humanity’s first contact with the menagerie of alien religious zealots called the Covenant. So you also gain some new insight into the Covenant’s religion and culture and their side of first contact (which is hardly noble, of course), as well as a couple surprising origin stories. Like most of the early Halo books, there’s a lot of grammatical errors, misprinting, and missing words, but I rate the book based on the merits of the narrative rather than the incompetence of the editors. Otherwise, it’s a really good further look into Sergeant Johnson’s character as well as that of a few others we know from the games.