T.L. Mancour

Warning, spoilers at the end.

This book reads like your drunk uncle with delusions of grandeur telling stories about how he singlehandedly won the war and how all women want him, except he worked at a Taco Bell near the base, and his ex wife won’t speak to him anymore. It’s like what a 12 year old boy would write if you told him to write a fantasy novel. There’s inconsistencies in the story, (try to read this book and track how many magic stones anyone has. You can’t. They appear and show more disappear as needed) there’s long boring diatribes that go nowhere and serve no purpose to the story other than to assure you that the main character is the most amazing person who ever lived, but other things are glazed over completely. The novel ends with the main character being forced to have sex with his ex girlfriend in full view of 4000 villagers waltzing by to get to the magic portal to safety. I wish any part of that was made up. Side note: WEIRDEST writing of a sex scene I’ve EVER read, and if you look at my read shelf, you’ll see how impressive that statement is. I don’t understand how anyone read this and decided the series needed 13 more books. show less

I found a lot of this book quite uncomfortable because of the way Picard continued to doubt the androids fleeing slavery and to dismiss their concerns and needs. Admittedly, at this point in TNG Data's personhood is only somewhat established. Yet it's still an uncomfortable read, and largely because the slavery the androids are in does not resemble Roman slavery, which (harsh as it was) had the possibility of freedom in it; it resembles New World racial slavery, and the book doesn't even show more approach that issue. I found that very disappointing. show less

I’m not happy

On the one hand, I was thrilled to see another novel in this series.

On the other hand...

This is a sloppy poop sandwich.

Whoever proofread this was vastly overpaid. If it wasn’t proofread... WHY NOT?!!!? At times I felt like I was staggering from grammatical error to grammatical error. Names of principal characters were swapped (pretty sure Tyndal isn’t marrying Gatina). Some sentences were mangled beyond easy reading.

SPELLCHECK CANT SAVE YOU!!! Sometimes a word is spelled show more right, but it is the wrong word. ‘Aids’ and ‘aides’ - only one of them refers to a person. One of the chapters managed to have the wrong word as it’s very first!!!

It was also a bit repetitive. Not terribly annoying, but it dragged the pace to read essentially the same words about the building of Vanador for the umpteenth time.

The timeline was also chaotic. Some of it was inherent in the style of the narrative, as each concept or plot line was followed for a bit, then a new concept might back the timeline up to fill in events. Occasionally, however, events grew tangled as to who knew what when.

In short, this was an editing failure. Self-publishing is no excuse for sloppy workmanship. If anything, maintaining your personal brand should drive a higher level of detail work.

I will probably buy the next novel because I love the world and the characters. But this is unprofessional. show less

Another one that I really enjoyed, that I don't want to read others' reviews of in case they're negative. Not a great cover - there are actually no battles, Spartacus himself plays a very minor role, and Riker doesn't even do as much as Picard. Data is the true hero.

It asks some big questions. What is sentience? Or sapience? What is life? What constitutes a race of people? Should certain actions be considered those committed by freedom fighters, or by terrorists? How does killing affect the show more person who kills? How does politeness affect the person who makes a habit of being polite? What can happen when the Prime Directive is violated? Etc.

I really like the advice/dressing down that Maran gave to Data about 1/2 way through the book.

Onward! So glad I'm sticking with this series, as the ratio of dreck to gem seems to be improving. show less