By all rights, David Weber’s War of Honor should be terrible, as the bloated 1000-page tenth volume of the Honor Harrington series. And it very nearly is. The first 300 pages of the book, for instance, involve a bunch of people fucking around and wasting time to no reasonable end (and many unreasonable ones, involving the world’s most shudder-worthy love triangle and those goddamn treecats). It’s perhaps the longest prologue in history, and I was afraid that there would be no story at all in the book.
But there is. It takes a while to get going, and it’s padded even when it does, but the core story in this book is just as compelling as it is in any of the previous (much shorter) volumes. Yeah, you could strip 600 pages out and improve the book, but the 400 pages that are left contain all the virtues that I’ve raved about in the previous volumes of this weirdly compelling series; and by the time I got to the end, I was in my by-now familiar mindset where everything in my life that wasn’t Honor Harrington was a distraction from reading more Harringtonian fiction.
If you’ve read this far in the series, you might as well keep reading, even if you do have to skim a bit, because it’s worth it in the end.
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