dunecello

The end of the fifth trilogy of the Foreigner series. This trilogy was a slog to get through. Cherryh certainly wrote these books for the audience that would pick them up as she wrote them, meaning the expectation is you read about one book a year. A large chunk of each book contains just recaps of what happened in the last few books. Consequently, it is difficult to binge read these books with so much of the story just constantly repeated to you and not much plot actually happening. At least Peacemaker threw of bunch of that into an appendix but it still didn't prevent a portion of the book from being revisited information. It took almost 150 pages for something interesting to happen. Maybe 20 pages were really good, and then the rest of the book consisted of politics and a birthday party for a character Cherryh is putting more and more in the place of the main character. I usually love the politics of this series but I need something new and interesting after 15 books. I heard the next trilogy is much better so I'm still going.

Very entertaining book. It's basically an R-rated adventure story and it warns you about that in the crazy first chapter. I love how it didn't hold back with Horza's various encounters with extreme cultures. The first half was 10/10. However the second half dragged quite a bit. Ending was excellent. I hope we are supposed to feel that Horza's main goal throughout the book is as pointless as the Idiran/Culture conflict because that's the conclusion I made.