A review by travelgirlut
Echoes of Honor by David Weber
3.0
(2.5 stars rounded up)
"Um." Every main character says it at least once, and it's used over and over again. The way I read that in my mind makes the characters all sound stupid. Plus, none of these main characters has ever said "um" before in any of the previous books, so why now?? Weber seems to grab onto certain phrases and sayings and they show up over and over again, and to me they are really obvious. How are the editors not seeing this? Another one he likes to use is Honor hugging Nimitz to her breasts. Such a man thing to write. Why can't she just hug him to her chest? But I supposed he just likes writing breasts instead.
Also, everyone in this book seemed really distracted. You get the first line in some exciting sounding section of the story, and then the character of focus would go off on some multi-page reminiscing of times past, usually about things that had no direct value to the story. Then they would mentally shake themselves (again, phrasing that was used repeatedly in the book) and the story would continue. Weber needs to wake his characters up and just get on with the story!
I read this to find out about how Honor escapes from Hell, and if you were to pull those sections out you'd have a fairly decent short story. The rest is telling what's going on in the rest of the war in the meantime. I get why that part of the story is important to tell, but the ratio of Honor to everything else was really skewed. And the action parts seemed to get glossed over so we could get back to the politics and analyzing of the rest of the book.
I do enjoy the Honor Harrington books, and I will continue to read them. This book is not as bad as I'm making it sound. I just picked the things that were bothering me the most to point out. If you've enjoyed the series up to this point, definitely read this one too. I actually felt it was done a bit better than the last one in terms of action versus politics, so hopefully they will continue to improve as I move forward!
"Um." Every main character says it at least once, and it's used over and over again. The way I read that in my mind makes the characters all sound stupid. Plus, none of these main characters has ever said "um" before in any of the previous books, so why now?? Weber seems to grab onto certain phrases and sayings and they show up over and over again, and to me they are really obvious. How are the editors not seeing this? Another one he likes to use is Honor hugging Nimitz to her breasts. Such a man thing to write. Why can't she just hug him to her chest? But I supposed he just likes writing breasts instead.
Also, everyone in this book seemed really distracted. You get the first line in some exciting sounding section of the story, and then the character of focus would go off on some multi-page reminiscing of times past, usually about things that had no direct value to the story. Then they would mentally shake themselves (again, phrasing that was used repeatedly in the book) and the story would continue. Weber needs to wake his characters up and just get on with the story!
I read this to find out about how Honor escapes from Hell, and if you were to pull those sections out you'd have a fairly decent short story. The rest is telling what's going on in the rest of the war in the meantime. I get why that part of the story is important to tell, but the ratio of Honor to everything else was really skewed. And the action parts seemed to get glossed over so we could get back to the politics and analyzing of the rest of the book.
I do enjoy the Honor Harrington books, and I will continue to read them. This book is not as bad as I'm making it sound. I just picked the things that were bothering me the most to point out. If you've enjoyed the series up to this point, definitely read this one too. I actually felt it was done a bit better than the last one in terms of action versus politics, so hopefully they will continue to improve as I move forward!