Review: But No Way To Continue That War
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 8, 2014
I bought the first book in this series and enjoyed it enough to give it 4-stars in spite of a few minor problems. It was well written and edited, with decent character development, and certainly held my attention enough to get me to buy the second book. Too bad this one isn't good enough to also give it the same number of stars.Unlike his first book, Ringel gets away from ignoring Newtonian Mechanics in this book by ignoring the concept all together. But there is less character development here than the first book, the combat gets a bit repetitious, and he failed to develop the ending plot line at all, which is inexcusable. No doubt it will get fleshed out in the third book, but if he felt he needed to do it as a teaser for that third book, he did readers a disservice.The writing is otherwise decent, as is the editing, but there is not enough human interaction and detail on the main character's new command. The situation he finds himself in should have been fleshed out much more than it was, and the deaths of so many characters and ships we meet should have received more attention.The author has a potentially good thing going here with this series. If he can get the surviving characters to interact better with each other, their ships, and the enemy; to stop ignoring Newton; and to make the space combat more interesting and less formulaic, Ringle will have a real winner with this series.