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Midst Toil And Tribulation (2012)

by David Weber(Favorite Author)

4.04 of 5 Votes: 5

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Tor Books

series

Safehold

review 1: "Midst Toil and Tribulation" of the Safehold series, book 6 is done! I loved it. It gets a little goofy at times as David Weber tries to lighten the mood because, after all, he's killing off thousands of people in each book so he needs to keep it light. :-)In this book, the Charisians invade the mainland in an attempt to save the Republic of Siddarmark. The Church of G-d Awaiting and the Inquisitor in particular have set off a firestorm, invading Siddarmark and destroying the warehouses and crops right before winter. Charis mobilizes its fleet in an effort to feed the dying republic on the mainland.Great book. As usual we watch as innovation cannot be stopped once started. The holy jihad was brought about because the Kingdom of Charis introduced a few logical and simple in... morenovations to sailing ships and muskets. Now the Church Inquisitor must adopt these changes in Church Navy and the Army of God if we wants to win this war he started.In a sense the Inquisitor has already lost because changes, once made, cannot be unmade. But until he realizes this, it's going to be a tough row to hoe.They introduce steam engines and breech-loading rifles. They are covering hundreds of years of development in just a few years. My mind is spinning. (I wonder when they get bi-planes? some reader remarked. I agree. If these guys are going to make it into space they are going to have to move this story along.)Loved it but I think this is going to be over a dozen books in the series by the end of it.
review 2: What can I say that I haven’t said before? This is #6 in the Safehold series, and it is both just more of the same and just as good as the foregoing. In this volume, the forces of evil, as represented by the Church of God Awaiting, finally gets its own licks in, in a typically asinine way, by attacking one of its satellite countries from which a significant percentage of its own revenue is obtained. Despite that questionable success, however, the Charis navy manages to wipe out still another fleet produced by the Mother Church because of the advanced weaponry the innovative citizens of the Empire of Charis keep coming up with. There is an upsetting section describing how some of the Mother Church citizens are also becoming more innovative, to the point of designing a new type of ship that may give the Charis navy problems, but it does not happen-probably because Weber could not work it into the 548 pages of this book, so we’ll see it in the next one … or the one after that. Meanwhile, the Empire is settling in with such minor new inventions as gun cotton and the steam engine and iron-clad vessels, and its leaders are traveling: King Cayleb goes to Siddarmark to remind them who is in charge, Queen Sharleyan returns to Chisholm for her half-year visit, and Prince Hector, now graduated to the rank of Lieutenant in the Charisian navy, discovers that the princess he rescued from exile is a truly beautiful young woman. All the major characters run through these pages, although some of them do not make it to the end of the book, but the novel also introduces an uncounted (at least I have not counted them, but I suspect Weber has) of new minor characters on both sides of the war. The wonderful story continues.Do I have problems with the book? Of course! TOR had done its usual bad performance of typesetting and proofreading, leaving words out of sentences, etc., and Stephen Youll has produced an impressive bit of cover art that has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the book, demonstrating that he has never read it. But the story … the story keeps marching on! I’m almost surprised that Weber did not start the sequence with the original chaotic adventures of the Human/Gbaba war: all we got was the bare outlines of that war and of the interaction of the Archangels when Safehold was terraformed, nearly 1,000 years before the action in the Safehold novels. And to think that all of this has to be simply a prequel to the eventual meeting of Safeholdians and the Gbaba; I do hope I live long enough to read the final volume! less

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