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Book Review of Off Armageddon Reef (Safehold, Bk 1)

Off Armageddon Reef (Safehold, Bk 1)
Minehava avatar reviewed on + 829 more book reviews


The writing is engaging and the first 1/5th of the book is reminiscent of Timothy Zahn's writing.
And you think this is pretty good.... Great Armageddon scenario! Great space fight for the survival of human race!

The next 1/5 of the book reads like the politics in McCaffrey's Dragons of Pern series.
And you think okeeeeeeeeeeey, this has been done before..... It is not bad, but not great either...

And then you realize David Weber does blotchy research, and also miss spells names from our own incorporated history, which is a disappointment considering how well the story has been going so far. (ex: Jan Huss I know as a fact only has one 's' as in Hus).
From then on the story turns from exciting to boring, from flowing to drudgery. He falls into endless monologs by single characters repeating forever what the reader heard 40x already and his descriptions of places and events are taking whole pages. Every time he jumps forward a century, he introduces new set of predictable events and flat, 'scenery characters'. As in useless in every way accept to support a handful of the main characters which are flat out evil megalomaniacs with God complex or goodie-goodie righteous revolutionaries/free-thinkers out to save the mindless sheep that the humanity has became. Sadly even our villains and heroes are one sided characters lacking in true depth. Their struggle is from a cookie cut mold, predictable and reminiscent of other books of this type.

This book had a stellar start but ended my 'trade out' pile.
It is my first book by this author and since his writing style was engaging and I loved the first 'Armageddon' part of the book (as much as I disliked the rest of it), I will try to pick another book by him from a different series.