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Title: The Price of Liberty
Series:
Empire Rising #4
Author: David Holmes
Rating:
3 of 5 Stars
Genre: SF
Pages:
388
Words: 155K
From the Publisher
War has been declared. The Indian Star Republic has landed ground troops on the newly discovered colony of Haven as they seek to seize access to the alien worlds of Vestar and Kulthar. The British Star Kingdom has reacted. A battle fleet has been formed with orders to drive off the Indians and retake Haven.
Cleared from a highly-politicized court martial and now newly married, Captain James Somerville leads Endeavour to join up with the fleet going to liberate Haven. Yet he is not entirely welcome for not everyone is happy with the outcome of the court martial.
Meanwhile, Major Johnston commands a small marine special forces unit stranded on Haven itself. Caught in the middle of a gruella war, he must use all his skills to help the resistance weaken the Indian invaders in anticipation of a British ground assault.
As the war quickly heats up, both men will learn the true price of liberty.
Something has changed. Either I have or the writing has. Or I’ve just noticed the writing. Many of the conversations were awkward and stilted, like they had been written, sigh, instead of just recording what was said between 2 people. There were also 2 letters written in this story that I simply skipped because they were pages long and was nothing but blather that didn’t actually do anything for the plot. As Polonius would have said “Brevity is the soul of wit”. (that’s Shakespeare for those not familiar with Hamlet) There was no brevity here.
The story is longer and is actually almost 2 stories. One about Cpt Somerville doing spaceship stuff and another about the super british marine who leads the insurgency on Haven. Both enjoyable but neither needed some of the padding that the author stuck in.
Now that the idea of “Space Kingdoms” has been introduced and the idea of this universe explored, I am afraid I am going to start focusing on the skill of the author in regards to wordsmithing. As Asimov proved, ideas might work fantastically for short stories, but you need solid plotting, characters and writing to successfully pull off a novel. I felt like I saw some cracks in the foundation of the writing part. I don’t expect every author to be as good as Rex Stout, the author who I now consider the preeminent wordsmith against who I judge every other author, but I do expect a bit more than simple “He said. She said.” kind of conversations. I realize also that writing from a first person view is different from a third person omniscient viewpoint but the point remains is that Holmes didn’t handle things nearly as well as I “remember” him doing in previous books.
This is one of the reasons I am not a big fan of long, ongoing series, especially for indies. Pedestrian writing can only go so far and then it becomes a bigger hindrance than anything, especially for me. I expect good quality in the books I read, not just basic skill.
I realize I have complained a lot here. The story is still good. The action was exciting. If I can set my mind to judge this based on that alone, I might be ok for the long haul. I suspect I’ll know my answer one way or another within 2 more books. I’ll either be able to paper over the cracks I’ve seen or they’ll just get bigger in my view and I’ll have to stop.
And with having close to 400 Books on my TBR , I’m getting to the point where just dropping a series midpoint doesn’t bother me anymore.
★★★☆☆
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