 – Customer review on 06/06/2007
A Hymn Before Battle, by John Ringo, explores the themes of alien encounters. Basically, a bunch of space-going peaceniks need to fight a war against carnivorous centaurs, and so turn to humanity as the last weapon they can possibly field.
This is the story of humanity struggling to adjust to their new place in the world, and more specifically about military persons training for, and deploying on, previously unforeseen missions.
It’s a fairly decent book, with well-worked characters and a fun story, but the characters are often two-dimensional and awfully similar to a whole lot of other ‘ruggedly handsome military’ characters out there. The best character was a female autistic sniper, who was just a secondary character in a minor plot-line, but she was just so interesting to watch that I kind of kept reading to see how she’d get on. And then Ringo killed her.
None of the other characters held my interest, and I began to sink into the deadly trap of I Just Don’t Care What Happens To These People. After you reach that point, you might as well stop reading and go to the movies.
‘A Hymn Before Battle’ is an interesting book, but I’m not sure if it’s a great offering. The autistic sniper is pretty cool, but is she really enough to hold together a book about something completely different?
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