I’ve been reading David Weber’s Honorverse books for twenty-ish years now. I say “ish” because I know I started reading them before my eighteen year old daughter was born, but not how much before. I know I was either dating, engaged or married to my ex-wife at the time, so that puts it somewhere between 2002 and 2006 when I decided to not strangle my coworker (He had been telling me all about this Weber fella ad nauseam but I had no idea who that was.) and pick up a copy of the first Honor Harrington, if I could find out what it was called. Fortunately the lady at the Waldenbooks (remember them?) was familiar with the Honorverse because both her brother and father loved it. She literally took me by the hand (good thing Nicole was at the shoe store) and led me over to the shelf and put a copy of On Basilisk Station in my hand before apologizing because they didn’t have a copy of book two (which I later found out was called The Honor of the Queen) available and she just knew I wouldn’t want to stop after the first book. She was right.
What can I say? I was a regular.
So now, two decades or so later, I find myself with a copy of David Weber’s Toll of Honor in my hands. Well, on my phone is probably closer to it. I bought the ebook. At any rate, this is a feeling I love and that I only learned to appreciate when I got into reading series that weren’t finished yet. Seriously, reading a book like Toll of Honor is like having an old friend over for a cup of coffee. You can’t wait to find out what’s going on and what they’ve been up to. You can’t get enough of each other. And then, the day is up and you each go your own way knowing how much you’ll miss each other. Or well, how badly I’ll miss all of these people that clearly don’t actually exist, but you get the idea.
And now, maybe, just possibly, I’ll talk about the book I’m actually reviewing. I think I did that once before, back during the pandemic. Possibly. Honestly though, my greatest strength and fondest hobby has always been digression. I remember this one time..
AHEM
So, yeah. That Toll of Honor book.
Dude, I loved it. There’s a lot here. Some of it isn’t exactly new. Toll of Honor is basically a flashback to the much earlier parts of the series. It covers a lot of the stuff that wasn’t covered the first time around and in his afterword, Weber mentions how he wants to go back and fill in some of the holes. I support that.
Seriously, this is a concept similar to Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Lost Chronicles. I loved those. It’s a chance to go back and not just see the missing bits of story, but to get to spend some time with old friends and maybe some characters I’m not as familiar with doing things that didn’t happen “onscreen” last time.
In the case of Toll of Honor it’s a good change to see some of what happens with some of the lower ranked characters and that was cool. Honor Harrington starts the series as a ship’s Captain and ends up commanding fleets. A lot of the people she hangs out with are either high ranking members of the military, politicians, nobles/royalty or some combination thereof. There is a lot of that here, because Honor has a big part in the book. We get to see her deal with the death of Paul Tankersley, her duels with Denver Summervale and Pavel Young and see Honor actually taking charge of Harrington Steading, all different takes than have appeared before. That’s not all of it though.
Brandy Bolgeo is not that. She’s a young woman just starting out in her naval career who just so happens to be very good at her job. Her family has a long tradition of military service but they’re not extremely rich or powerful. Weber has a tendency to mention the little guy, but this is one of a few times that he focuses on the little guy, or girl as the case may be. I like that.
In the first part of Toll of Honor we see a lot of Honor Harrington. That was pretty much inevitable. The second half of the book focuses primarily on other characters. People like Senior Chief Horace Harkness, Sergeant Major Iris Babcock and, as mentioned previously, Brandy Bolgeo.
And Weber’s strength is, and always has been, his sense of character. Brandy is a woman who has goes through a lot. She’s wounded in combat, has to recover from those wounds and then go on to continue serving in a wartime navy. She has a lot of emotion to deal with but she’s not some shrinking violet. She reminds me a lot of a young Honor Harrington, but she has her own personality. I like this woman.
Being an Honorverse novel there is plenty of combat. Action abounds and death rides happen. Things explode. The enemy this time around is the People’s Republic of Haven. It’s a different take on the war. Honor missed a lot of this war while she was on half pay and spent it in Grayson as one of their flag officers. Bolgeo doesn’t miss it. She’s in the thick of the war and so are a lot of other point of view characters.
Weber keeps in mind the proverb that “Amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics.” There is lot here about the logistics of the war and the problems that come from fighting a war that the Star Kingdom of Manticore wasn’t prepared for. This is a take on war that I’ve rarely seen, and I’ve studied history. Histories don’t go in to this level of detail and Toll of Honor manages to do it while being vastly entertaining while doing it. Weber personalizes the effects of the shortages on the troops and the war.
This is the twentieth book in the mainline Honorverse and there are only God knows how many side novels and anthologies. Books like Toll of Honor are why I can’t wait for the next one.
Bottom Line: 5.0 out of 5 Rebuilt Impeller Nodes
Toll of Honor
David Weber
Baen Books, 2024
Toll of Honor is available for purchase at the following link. If you click the link and buy literally anything from Amazon, I make a small percentage at no additional cost to you.
Apparently, this is the first of the "Expanded Honorverse" series where David deals with some back story corners. 😁