This
is the second in a “Young Adult” series of science-fiction novels
set in Weber's wonderful “Honorverse,” the fictional
universe in which his Honor Harrington series of space opera
sagas are set. The heroine of these tales is Honor's several
centuries' great grandmother Stephanie Harrington, who as a young
girl first discovered the sentient race of “treecats” and forged
the first ever bond between human and treecat, on the Manticoran Star
Kingdom planet Sphinx. It's now a couple of Earth-years after the
events of the first novel, but only turning from summer to autumn in
the much longer year of that larger, heavy-gravity planet. From the
inside flap:
“Loyalties
Tested by Fire.
“Fire
weather . . . That's what the treecats call those rare seasons when
the slightest spark can set aflame the vast green reaches they call
home.
“Teen-aged
Stephanie Harrington rapidly learns just how deadly those fires can
be. Guided by her treecat companion, Lionheart, Stephanie and her
good friend Karl Zivonik venture into the heart of a raging inferno
to rescue twin treecats put at risk by human carelessness. Only the
trio's absolute trust for each other stands between them and
disaster.
“But
Sphinx isn't the only thing ripe for burning. Stephanie has fallen
hard for new arrival to Sphinx, Anders Whittaker. When Anders
vanishes without a trace, Stephanie is at the forefront of the
search. Then a lightning strike sets the Copperwall Mountains aflame
and as a provisional ranger she is ordered to her post.
“Will
Stephanie choose to honor the claims of her planet or those of her
heart?”
For
this second novel, Weber takes on a collaborator, frequent
contributor to the various Honorverse anthologies Jane
Lindskold. I have no idea what the division of labor was in this
particular case, but I could detect no real difference in voice or
style from the first book, A Beautiful Friendship, which Weber
wrote alone. This is a very worthy sequel, smoothly continuing the
saga of Stephanie Harrington and Lionheart (or, in the People's
telepathic language, Death Fang's Bane and Climbs Quickly)
and the ongoing adjustments that have to be made between two
intelligent species now sharing a single world. As the jacket-blurb
quoted above indicates, as Stephanie has matured from her early- to
mid-teen years, she's experiencing all the normal changes that
entails. That aspect of the story is handled very well; there's
nothing here any parent would object to, which is indeed a
consideration for me considering for whom I intend this book as a
Christmas present.
Of
course, I am myself a huge fan of Weber's Honorverse series
(of which The Star Kingdom is actually the third, in addition
to the aforementioned anthology collections of short stories), and
will read anything in that setting. But, like A Beautiful
Friendship, I specifically bought this book to give to my
eleven-year-old niece, a voracious reader. I gave that first novel
to her for her birthday this past summer, and was a bit dismayed to
find at Thanksgiving that she hasn't read it yet. One of the
unfortunate by-products of the Accelerated Reader programs that many
schools use to encourage kids to read is that they become a bit
mercenary in their reading, focussing only on books for which they
can earn AR points. She wasn't aware that for A Beautiful
Friendship, at least, an AR test exists, until I did a quick
Internet search and confirmed it, whereupon her interest perked up.
Hopefully she's read it by now and will be eager to continue the
story. By giving her these kinds of books, I'm hoping to steer her
away from the mainstream of teen “young adult” fiction that seems
to prevail, that all seems to this old fuddy-duddy well past verging
on the inappropriate, toward something of a higher quality than
Twilight and all its ilk. And as she gets older she will have
a whole “Honorverse” of a couple dozen more books (at
present) waiting on her to explore.
Cheers,
and Thanks for reading!
Addendum:
I must say I'm not very taken with the cover art here. The main
problem is that Stephanie's head is about three sizes too small for
her body. Other than that, it's not too bad, although the
background, while colored as if to indicate fire, seems more like the
exhaust ports of a space craft than one of the raging forest fires
that are the major threat of the story.
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