Echoes of Honor Review

Booklist

Each successive Honor Harrington novel bulks larger than the last, but then, so does its audience. Honor, though, spends much of this book on the lean and hungry side as she organizes a mass escape from a prison planet aptly known as Hell; now permanently shy an arm and an eye, she is definitely physically reduced, anyhow. While Honor and a handful of survivors of the climax of In Enemy Hands try to organize history's biggest prison break (of about 300,000 POWs), three other subplots keep the pot boiling and the reader turning pages. Grayson, on which Honor is a "steadholder," confronts interesting legal and medical problems in supplying her steading with an heir; the Royal Manticoran Navy introduces the equivalent of the aircraft carrier and finds battleship admirals as obdurate in the future as they were in the past; and the antagonist Peeps are beginning to develop a hard core of competent, professional warriors, so when they go on the offensive, the Manticorans no longer have things their way. It is impossible not to be entertained, delighted, even enthralled by this splendid piece of storytelling. Roland Green n