I am a big fan of fantasy and science fiction novels especially if they are long and have several books in the series. I really enjoy a series of books that I can immerse myself in and I first picked up an Elizabeth Moon novel because it was long and part of a multi-novel series. I continue to read her books because I find them engrossing and highly enjoyable. ( )

See book 7, Against the Odds

Esmay and Brun and the young Barron Serrano go to space fleet school together and a romance novel follows, followed by a view of some fanatic anti women cult, followed by violence against women and conspiracies with magic resolutions.

Not the best book in the series by far. There are good parts. There are parts (or the lack of parts) that really hurts the overall picture. ( )

Excellent story. I especially like the space warfare scenes but enjoyed following characters familiar from previous books. I have the next book in ther seires on order from the library and I can't wait. ( )

I want to say this was simply a bad book but I think that's just my disappointment with Elizabeth Moon for basically phoning it in. She adheres to the rather annoying trope of RAPE IS DRAMA that so turned me off Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. Which to me is just a sign of laziness. I also found it really annoying to have the author keep throwing in lines about the various rapes that are supposed to leave it up to our imaginations as to what happened, as lets be honest, there are only so ways a woman or anyone for that matter can be sexually assaulted. And I really doubt a culture in which the discussion of sex is not any form of taboo would have people of any age think a line like "she didn't even know the words for what had been done to them". Either fade to black and skip to afterwards or be explicit. This 12a certificate non-sense is just insulting.

The absurd bad guys, who are straight out of a cartoon except for all the rape and breeding of women, don't belong in this series that has been fairly realistic with it's setting so far. The space barbarians where are least a credible societal model rather than a bad joke at the expense of Texas.

The thing that really did it for me though was her rewriting of Brun's character to something that only barely fit within the credible given how she developed over the first trilogy. I could hear Brun being stretched and twisted to fit into a shape that was more appropriate for her Bubbles persona.

All in all I think I'm done with this series. Vatta Wars is a better series from the word go. The Familias Regnant series is so obviously a trial run that just went out of control. ( )