Once A Hero

It is easy to love a hero who is not 100% they’re anything better than fairly lucky. That is the kind of character that Esmay Suiza represents. She’s not the overly-confident hero that many of the super-heroic captains; she’s had it rough, and she’s not entirely confident in her own choices. The way Elizabeth Moon works with the character, both through back story and in the plot in the Familias Regnant series, makes her that much more impressive. The big thing with the books of Elizabeth Moon is always the attention to the existence of the bigger picture. She bounces between events of other books, Moon’s series are all a part of the same fairly dense family tree, but they also exist as individual entities. This novel has deep connections, but then fights within itself to draw readers into new avenues, and eventually into a new character set that draws readers in far deeper in a single novel than any of the other entire series. Why it’s on the list Elizabeth Moon is the first lady of Military Science Fiction, and this is the best of her books.