PatentedGraph53 reviewed The Lost and the Damned by Guy Haley (The Siege of Terra, #2)
Siege of Terra: The Lost and the Danmed review
3 stars
The second novel of the Siege of Terra series, The Lost and the Damned picks up where The Solar War left off, with the traitor legions at Terra. Like its predecessor this novel falls flat in a few places, however I feel there are higher highs than The Solar War had. It might just be me, but the text feels somewhat off, I might call it a bit Young Adult for my liking. This issue mainly arises when Primarchs are involved though, other scenes with characters like Katsuhiro and the Alpha Legion agents feel quite good. Also, something weird about this novel is how it kind of feels like it is meant to be the first book of the arc. The first pages for multiple main characters, mainly Primarchs, describe them as though the reader has no idea who they are and what they're like, almost as though its a …
The second novel of the Siege of Terra series, The Lost and the Damned picks up where The Solar War left off, with the traitor legions at Terra. Like its predecessor this novel falls flat in a few places, however I feel there are higher highs than The Solar War had. It might just be me, but the text feels somewhat off, I might call it a bit Young Adult for my liking. This issue mainly arises when Primarchs are involved though, other scenes with characters like Katsuhiro and the Alpha Legion agents feel quite good. Also, something weird about this novel is how it kind of feels like it is meant to be the first book of the arc. The first pages for multiple main characters, mainly Primarchs, describe them as though the reader has no idea who they are and what they're like, almost as though its a jumping on point for whoever doesn't know the characters. Alongside all that though, there are the moral characters, and oh I love them. Katsuhiro is just a normal conscript to the defense of Terra, and seeing the conflict through his eyes helps establish what the war is like for your average person. He doesn't really get much information and is thrown into the thick of it, its very nice. With him are also two Alpha Legion agents, who were apparently characters from the Praetorian of Dorn novel, and these two are my favorite characters in this book, easily. They have been cut of from the Traitors after the Battle of Pluto and have just been tasked with causing destruction to the loyalists, and they way the two different characters deal with this fate is nice. One figures their job is done and they can wait out the war and try to live peacefully together, whereas the other is a true believer, staying dedicated to the cause until the very end. Its a pair of contrasting characters that really interest me, and honestly makes me want to retry reading Praetorian of Dorn just to see more of these characters. In the end, the book certainly seems to serve its purpose. I didn't talk about everything and all of the characters as many of them feel rather uninteresting and not that worth talking about. As I said before though, the best bits bring this novel up for me a little.
