A review by trike
Wolf Star: Tour of the Merrimack #2 by R.M. Meluch
3.0
I see that a lot of people have a love/hate feeling about this book, and many seem genuinely mystified as to why they don't really like it yet find it compulsively readable. I think I know why.
The first reason is that it is formulaic and generic in the sense that Meluch has taken the usual tropes of "wet navy = space navy" and simply run with them, while serving up straightforward action performing swashbuckling acts of derring-do by black-and-white characters.
The second is that the writing is as barebones as you'll find outside of a screenplay or an outline. In fact, it often reads like an outline that has merely had some areas a bit more fleshed out than others, sort of like Chip Kidd's classic design for the cover of Jurassic Park where he took a Xerox copy of a T. rex skeleton and just started coloring in the spaces and stopped when he thought it looked it good enough. (Seriously, that's how he did it. See his TED talk for more.)
I enjoy reading screenplays, probably more than I like reading books. Purple prose bores me. Overly florid and detailed description puts me right to sleep. Sometimes I just want authors to Get. To. The. Point. So that style here wasn't too bothersome other than Meluch didn't use complete sentences most of the time. That does kind of bother me. I like to see a nice balance between terseness and sentence fragments.
(Holy fucking shit, iPad, I MEANT to write "terseness," not "tenseness." Stop it. Any mistakes in my writing belong to Apple. I'm flawless.)
Anyway, I liked this book a bit less than the first one, [b:The Myriad|640814|The Myriad (Tour of the Merrimack, #1)|R.M. Meluch|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309199732s/640814.jpg|627008]. (Which I see I haven't reviewed here because I read it some years before joining Goodreads. Suffice to say it was a 4-star book.) This one feels like it has caricatures rather than characters.
That said, I do like the fact Meluch has made her world consistent and sticks to the rules she's made up throughout. Too many space fantasies simply make something up to serve the needs of the plot and then forget about them later. (Looking at you, Stars War and Trek.)
This reads a lot like the Horatio Hornblower -- or more probably Aubrey-Mautin -- seafaring tales. Except instead of England going against Spain or France, it's America going against a reconstituted Roman Empire... in spaaaace! They even run out flags for some reason. And at one point someone draws up a facsimile of the Stars and Stripes and hoists it into space in the time it took you to read this sentence. So things in this book FEEL like they're moving incredibly fast but when you think about them they actually move quite slow. Except when they don't. That love/hate thing again.
This is like an action movie where nobody eats or pees.
I'd like to give this 4 stars, but there was too much of a hint of that deus ex machina from time to time. Such as when Captain Farragut orders his crew to learn how to fight with swords, and then later their systems fail (no spoilers as to why) and they have to fight with swords. I mean, it's really just so she can write Master and Commander (in spaaaace!), but Meluch does come up with an internally-consistent reason for it to happen. I just wish it had been better integrated and not such an obvious Chekov's Gun.
If you like military space opera, you'll like this. You should check out the [b:Sten|714720|Sten (Sten, #1)|Chris Bunch|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388385381s/714720.jpg|700974] series by Bunch and Cole. It has similar action and style, but they use complete sentences.
The first reason is that it is formulaic and generic in the sense that Meluch has taken the usual tropes of "wet navy = space navy" and simply run with them, while serving up straightforward action performing swashbuckling acts of derring-do by black-and-white characters.
The second is that the writing is as barebones as you'll find outside of a screenplay or an outline. In fact, it often reads like an outline that has merely had some areas a bit more fleshed out than others, sort of like Chip Kidd's classic design for the cover of Jurassic Park where he took a Xerox copy of a T. rex skeleton and just started coloring in the spaces and stopped when he thought it looked it good enough. (Seriously, that's how he did it. See his TED talk for more.)
I enjoy reading screenplays, probably more than I like reading books. Purple prose bores me. Overly florid and detailed description puts me right to sleep. Sometimes I just want authors to Get. To. The. Point. So that style here wasn't too bothersome other than Meluch didn't use complete sentences most of the time. That does kind of bother me. I like to see a nice balance between terseness and sentence fragments.
(Holy fucking shit, iPad, I MEANT to write "terseness," not "tenseness." Stop it. Any mistakes in my writing belong to Apple. I'm flawless.)
Anyway, I liked this book a bit less than the first one, [b:The Myriad|640814|The Myriad (Tour of the Merrimack, #1)|R.M. Meluch|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309199732s/640814.jpg|627008]. (Which I see I haven't reviewed here because I read it some years before joining Goodreads. Suffice to say it was a 4-star book.) This one feels like it has caricatures rather than characters.
That said, I do like the fact Meluch has made her world consistent and sticks to the rules she's made up throughout. Too many space fantasies simply make something up to serve the needs of the plot and then forget about them later. (Looking at you, Stars War and Trek.)
This reads a lot like the Horatio Hornblower -- or more probably Aubrey-Mautin -- seafaring tales. Except instead of England going against Spain or France, it's America going against a reconstituted Roman Empire... in spaaaace! They even run out flags for some reason. And at one point someone draws up a facsimile of the Stars and Stripes and hoists it into space in the time it took you to read this sentence. So things in this book FEEL like they're moving incredibly fast but when you think about them they actually move quite slow. Except when they don't. That love/hate thing again.
This is like an action movie where nobody eats or pees.
I'd like to give this 4 stars, but there was too much of a hint of that deus ex machina from time to time. Such as when Captain Farragut orders his crew to learn how to fight with swords, and then later their systems fail (no spoilers as to why) and they have to fight with swords. I mean, it's really just so she can write Master and Commander (in spaaaace!), but Meluch does come up with an internally-consistent reason for it to happen. I just wish it had been better integrated and not such an obvious Chekov's Gun.
If you like military space opera, you'll like this. You should check out the [b:Sten|714720|Sten (Sten, #1)|Chris Bunch|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388385381s/714720.jpg|700974] series by Bunch and Cole. It has similar action and style, but they use complete sentences.