There are some issues I have with this book. It gets boring and tedious quite fast. And it shouldn't have. But David Weber adds characters and side-plots - and that would be awesome if he would've written a 900 pages book, but he does not. So we're left with a pretend French Revolution, with a Rob S Pierre, with a war in space that is described in gruesome detail.

He makes it up, however, by humanizing Honor a bit more. Finally, there's some real relationships at play: a friend, Heneke, and a boyfriend, Tankersley. And the point is that for once, this character makes sense, even if Weber cuts a lot of corners, and we really don't know why Honor starts a relationship with this Tankersley dude. But heck, suspension of disbelief!

Yes, it took me a lot of time to read this - mostly because it was so damned boring when he went into details on every single nook and cranny, that I thought of abandoning the book several times. I held on to it, though, and in the end it was a pleasant experience. Not as pleasant as I expected, but pleasant enough.