Honorverse: A Call to Duty, Timothy Zahn, David Weber, Thomas Pope

A Call to Duty
Book 1 of Manticore Ascendant, of the Honorverse
David Weber, Timothy Zahn, Thomas Pope (go BuNine!)
ISBN: 9781476736846
Read September 15, 2014

Thanks to Dragoncon and a good friend, I got this way earlier than I should have (official pubdate is nearly a month off on October 7).  I got my mitts on it on September 2nd, and I've been trying to hold off (to avoid spoilery bits) but I ran out of other things to read so here we are.

The good:

No endless meetings with talking heads.  Not to say that there aren't both meetings and talking heads, and sometimes both, but they're short.  Succinct even.

No characters we really know.  Everyone here is from way back when, in the mists of Manticore's founding days, and the only character that has even shown up is Mr Long, of A Call to Arms short story from the Beginnings anthology, and that almost doesn't count since it was obviously planned to be a teaser.

Haven are the good guys.  Like actual nice people with a functioning star system and neighbors who aren't either subjugated or frightened of being subjugated.

The navy SUCKS.  Now, why is this a good thing?  Because it gives us something to work out over the series - the question of how it went from mothballs to a national institution is an interesting one, and it's nice to have reasons to keep reading besides the immediate plot and characters.  For a world as well-imagined and totally invested as the Honorverse, having this sort of 'background information' as part of the plotting and character motivation is really cool, and very fun to read.


The bad:
One of the downsides of making a stickler into your main character is that it's suddenly difficult to get a picture of them as a full person.  Travis isn't quite jelling for me, and I know this author, and I have loved his characters (in fact, I love several of them in this book) just - none of them are the MAIN character.  This might turn off less devoted fans of the Honorverse (translation: readers who aren't slavering fanatics like me) and that would be very sad.

The pacing is a little - fragmentary?  Segmented?  Disjointed.  Piecemeal. None of those are quite what I want.  I liked the individual sections very much, and I followed the chronology of the narrative just fine, but each time the overall scene shifted, it was a very BIG shift, and I can't quite put my finger on why.  It was very peculiar, and frankly a little offputting.  Each big break was an opportunity to out the book down, and I'm not used to those places being so obvious.  Very weird.

The (totally unbiased and scientific) Verdict:
YAY!  A new Honorverse book!  Read all the books!  Love them!  Pre-order them from your favorite bookstore!

Seriously tho, a solid if slightly rocky new installment.  Very much worth the read.