Review of 'The Ashes of Worlds (Saga of Seven Suns)' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This is the 7th and final volume of the Saga of Seven Suns. I've you read the series up to book 6, you might as well finish it. This is a fast paced, epic conclusion to the series and in my opinion is one of the better books in the Saga.
The pros: fast action almost from the start, you get right to the meat of the conflict. The conclusion is suitably epic and satisfying. The series as a whole presents an interesting variety of social groups- Humans: the Hansa, the Roamers, the Therons, Ildirans, Klikiss (and their robots), and the Elementals: faeros, hydrogues, verdani and wentals. While the elementals are probably among the more interesting ones, the relationship between the human factions is more clearly fleshed out, considering most of the characters are humans.
The cons: the characters don't change too much in this book, in fact, throughout the …
This is the 7th and final volume of the Saga of Seven Suns. I've you read the series up to book 6, you might as well finish it. This is a fast paced, epic conclusion to the series and in my opinion is one of the better books in the Saga.
The pros: fast action almost from the start, you get right to the meat of the conflict. The conclusion is suitably epic and satisfying. The series as a whole presents an interesting variety of social groups- Humans: the Hansa, the Roamers, the Therons, Ildirans, Klikiss (and their robots), and the Elementals: faeros, hydrogues, verdani and wentals. While the elementals are probably among the more interesting ones, the relationship between the human factions is more clearly fleshed out, considering most of the characters are humans.
The cons: the characters don't change too much in this book, in fact, throughout the entire series you have a very clear picture of who are the good guys and bad guys, you rarely see moral ambiguity or 3D characters. It seems, almost, that there are only 2-3 bad guys in the entire universe (with tons of lackeys to do their dirty work) and no one can stand up to them. All the other characters have perfect morality and in their naive simplicity will never once deviate from their beliefs even if doing so would solve so many problems. Only the 'bad' guys ever change sides. I would say the characters in the book (and the series as a whole) are probably the weakest part of the story.
Another minor issue is that the author makes an effort to describe where everyone is after the conflict. So after the climax, we still have 30-40 pages to read of so-and-so got married, so-and-so are now here, so-and-so are happy (no one is unhappy in the end). I think all of that cut have been cut and just go straight to the end, as the last chapter seemed to pack just a little bit more emotion than the prior ones.
This slow ending is coincidentally similar to the slow start of the series. [b:Hidden Empire|898232|Hidden Empire (The Saga of Seven Suns, #1)|Kevin J. Anderson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1179283380s/898232.jpg|883419] takes ~100 pages to actually get to the action. So I guess if you can deal with the slow start and end, and with the occasional up and downs in the series (a few books weren't as good as the others), and if you don't want overly complex characters, then you may want to give this series a try.
