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Against the Tide | Rating | |
| B | |||
| John Ringo | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Council Wars | There Will Be Dragons, Emerald Sea, Against the Tide, East of the Sun, West of the Moon | ||
The United Free States forces have developed a good way to fight New Destiny's attempts to remake the world. They've managed to build some good ships for a Navy, too. But the best ships in the world are useless if the admirals running the Navy are too building empires and enjoying the perks of command to do their jobs. And when those admirals' egos and stupidity get the UFS fleet's head handed to it, it'll be up to Edmund Talbot to pick up the pieces, reassemble a fleet, and make it fight. Because New Destiny's invasion is not just coming. It is on.
There's not really any setup or refresher course for readers at the start of the book. Ringo just assumes his fans will remember what happened in the last books, at least the essentials. In some books that can be a problem, but here it works. The first two books are important, and definitely need to be read first, but other than remembering who the characters are and which side they're on, there's very little detail that needs to be recalled. The story nearly immediately jumps into a crisis, and that doesn't seem to hurt things at all.
That crisis, the battle between the two navies, happened very fast, over amazingly few pages. The battle includes dozens of ships, not to mention dragons, mer, and cuts back to the communications and administration base on shore. Yet it is done after only a few dozen pages. It achieves this by being very sketchy, skimming over a lot of detail. True, there's no main characters actually present for readers to follow, and the book ran for over 500 pages, anyway. But I still think it was a big mistake. Ringo knows how to write a battle, and this could have been one to remember. Instead, it's just a plot point.
Afterwards, though, we get to see Talbot and his staff trying to get the Navy back on its feet - whether it wants the help or not. The way they cut through the ingrained resistance to the changes they impose will engender warm fuzzies in any reader that has had to deal with management intrangigence. Which is probably any reader.
But the book really falls down in the climax, much to my surprise. Ringo tosses off ship and character names willy-nilly. Many of them, perhaps most of them, readers are seeing there for the first time, right in the middle of another battle. And the text goes back and forth from one ship to another, from one crewman to another, very often and very quickly. It was extremely easy for me to get confused whether I was seeing things from a ND point of view or a UFC one. It didn't help that several of the battles were widely seperated. Just as bad as all that is how sketchily even these fights are. And this time there's no excuse, because main characters are most definitely present so see and participate in what's going on. Besides, it's the climax! And while there's plenty of action, drama, and tension to be had, Ringo missed out in a big way on a chance to make it a real white-knuckle ride. It wasn't as dramatic as it could have been - not to mention the times I wondered when this or that development to the battle had managed to take place.
While Against the Tide starts well, and carries through more than compentently, it just plain falls below expectations in the end. It's still a good book, don't get me wrong, but I was seriously disappointed in how Ringo wrapped things up.
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