arrived b4 stated time,as described,well pleased. texasbeerguide.com great series texasbeerguide.com
READ The Heart of Valor
$20.26 shippingOnly 3 left in stock ( on the way). The Heart of Valor
Tanya Huff rarely disappoints and indeed this is another page turner. I'm not particularly into Military SF but I like Torin Kerr, Huff's rough, tough Marine sergeant. She's already had two outings in `Valor's Choice' and `The Better Part of Valor' both of which I read in a Huff binge when first I discovered her a few years ago. She's a storyteller with an eye for detail, a good insight into character and thoughtful world building. One of the things that both attracts and repels me about Mil SF is the alphabet soup language. Did the NCO stay with the VTA or did she go back for the remains of the PFC? And when the gunny is off duty in the SRM should she be thinking about the CSO or worrying about getting the KC 7s safely back beyond the ZP? Combine this with a large cast of characters some from previous Valor novels that include three different races sporting unfamiliar name types and my head is in danger of exploding. I can just about keep up, carried forward by the tremendous pace of the action, but I do have the occasional WTF moment! Despite the totally believable but sometimes hard to remember military dialogue there's a good mystery in this book. A training exercise gone wrong turns into a nightmare and newly promoted Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, (only there as a temporary aide to Major Svensson who is on a field test to work out regrown body parts after major battle trauma) has to than babysit a bunch of untried recruits when the expected test scenarios turn lethal. In the end it's all fall out from something that happened in the last book (so I recommend starting with the other two Valor books if you can and they're well worth reading, too). There's a new Torin Kerr book out in 2009 Valor's Trial and I look forward to seeing where the overarching story takes us. texasbeerguide.com Battles, aliens, great heroine and mystery and mayhem. What is not to like about this book. Can't wait to read the next one. texasbeerguide.com I really enjoy reading Tanya Huff's books! They are light hearted and fast paced with engaging characters. Heart of Valour is well worth a read. texasbeerguide.com This is the third book in Tanya Huff’s Valor/Confederation series, and there are no cliffhangers and each book stands alone. However to properly appreciate it, you should read the first two books as the events in each provide a larger story arc and are referred to in this book. I love this series, so much so that I’ve re read it several times, and I highly recommend the entire series.
Other reviewers have compared Ms. Huff’s Confederation series to David Weber’s Honor Harrington series. I have read and enjoyed Honor Harrington, and IMHO David Weber’s writing is often awesome, but unfortunately, sometimes it bogs down and drags boringly through too much behind the scenes political maneuvering and too broad a cast of characters. When Weber is on point, I devour his books. When he’s not, it’s a chore to force myself to finish reading.
In comparison, Tanya Huff’s Confederation series has never once bored me. To me, the military bits feel authentic, but the story is not bogged down by picky details of politics. I find that it’s largely character and action driven. Add in good dialog, a bit of mystery, a bit of humor, interesting aliens, and great world building, and you have a terrific space opera, action adventure story.
EDITING ISSUES: I read the ebook edition of “The Heart of Valor” with my hardcover edition in hand to compare. And the publisher did a fairly decent job of transferring the print edition to digital format. There were NO misspelled words caused through Optical Character Recognition mistakes, and the digital edition seems to have faithfully reproduced the many instances of italicized text used to indicate emphasis, communication through headgear, alien language, etc. Unfortunately, DAW clearly missed the ball on other issues, which I find extremely sloppy and disappointing from a major publisher.
In the original hardcover print edition of the book, Ms. Huff denotes scene breaks through the use of a double spaced gap between paragraphs. In the digital ebook edition, ALL paragraphs have double spaces between them. This results in the loss of the scene break indication. Also, a handful of breaks were indicated through the use of 3 asterisks (* * *) dividing the text. These breaks are also lost in the ebook edition. Lack of these scene breaks can cause a little disorientation when, for example the scene shifts from someone in camp to someone on scouting duty, or from one room in a building to another, and so forth. In comparison with the print edition, I counted a total of 137 missing scene breaks.
Other editing problems are several instances of words that are run together without spaces. I counted 27 missing spaces. An easy and simple spell check would have caught these errors. Shame on DAW for missing these easy to find errors.
There are 8 other minor editing issues, some of which also occur in the print edition: 1 misplaced comma, 1 unwanted space in the middle of a word, 1 unwanted hyphen, 1 missing quotation mark, 2 incorrect verb tenses, 1 typo, and 1 instance of repeated words.
All in all, the editing issues are not too distracting, and the ebook edition is quite readable, but be prepared to re read paragraphs occasionally to figure out the scene breaks. I’m disappointed in DAW for not including these breaks in the ebook edition. texasbeerguide.com The Heart of Valor is book three in Tanya Huff’s delightful Confederation series. Torin goes back to her own training days and even finds herself dealing with her old drill instructor. At this point she has every expectation that whatever supposedly easy run she’s sent on couldn’t possibly end well, and naturally she’s right.
One of the things I love about the setup is the way in which Tanya Huff uses the training scenarios. After all, even though the scenarios have gone wonky, all of the setups, resources, etc. are still available. It’s up to Torin and her compatriots to figure out what each scenario was meant to teach, and thus how it would have been arrayed, which challenges are meant to be overcome, and what resources might be available to them. Then of course they have to figure out what’s changed and what the planet will throw at them. This leads to interesting setups and sequences of events.
Torin is a fun character. She has so much presence and so much style. She gets most of the best lines and all of the best scenes. This does not mean, however, that the secondary characters suffer from any lack of attention. One of Huff’s strengths is her ability to pack a book from cover to cover with well drawn side characters of all types. This time she has a canvas of an entire platoon of recruits and their minders, and she does great things with that.
The Heart of Valor has a plotline where the reader gets to see a little than the characters do. In some books this can lead to frustration with the characters for missing what the reader sees, but I didn’t find that to be the case here. I felt that the characters drew appropriate conclusions from the information they had and didn’t ignore anything too obvious.
I have a real love for good military SF that I had all but forgotten about until I started reading Tanya Huff’s Confederation novels. Of course now I’m probably spoiled for the genre; Huff has such a deft touch with world building and plot spinning that it’s hard for other authors to measure up. texasbeerguide.com