Through Fiery Trials: A Novel in the Safehold Series

A pretty disappointing departure from the action of previous books in the series. Nothing interesting happens, yet it was the most expensive book so far. I'm not holding out much hope for another one, given most of Weber's recent books appear to be in conjunction with other authors. Fair play I suppose, given almost 60 years of writing! My head-canon is the ending is the second part of the N plan, and what happens next is left as an exercise in imagination for the reader.

As much as I like the original character development, the last several books could have been condensed to about 75 pages each and covered all the important aspects of the book. In this case we have many points of view and do spend a lot of time with the former enemies and their reconstruction effort. Unfortunately, most of the book is meetings and conversations. Very little action at all. We end up with the cliff hanger that makes us want the next book way too late. Even though a lot of time passed, we did not get much movement in the timeline. We did get introduced to what is probably the next generation of main characters. I guess we'll have to wait another couple of years...

I was so sure this was the end of the series, IT'S NOT! Kinda bothered by that. The book itself was one of the more boring/uninteresting of the series. But THAT ENDING! I did not see that coming! PLEASE PUBLISH THE 11TH BOOK NOW! It's been a few years now and I just finished it again. I enjoyed it more this time. It's possibly the slowest paced book of the series so far. Quite a few things happen over the 15ish years this book covers and Safehold is a very different planet by its end. (What I wouldn't give to step in there and knock some heads together.) In the end it's a compelling portrayal of a post-war world with an ongoing realization that the war might have been the easy part of the job. I don't regret having it as an entry in the series. My thoughts on the ending haven't changed much.