I was out on vacation last week and that meant some good reading. I read Kevin J. Anderson’s Saga of the Seven Suns. I read them all on Kindle. Normally I don’t mention that but I actually mention formatting in my review, so I’ll put that out there.
Book seven will get some notice next week but for now let me review all the books as a series, which they are. The series starts with Hidden Empire. This is a great beginning and lets you get to know the characters. Having read Dark Between the Stars FIRST many of the character names stood out as I started reading. I knew who would live and who wouldn’t. That was a bit disappointing but not unduly so. Also the characters have changed a great deal as far as how they react and what they do, so that also took some getting used to.
The biggest negative was that in the first two books there were definitely some formatting errors, which is more about the publisher than Anderson. I can only hope his publisher will take another look at their ebook formatting and fix some of the problems, which included font sizes changing randomly.
The series continues through A Forest of Stars, Horizon Storms, Scattered Suns, Of Fire and Night, Metal Swarms and Ashes of the World. It’s great big space opera series which is a lot of fun. Reading it all at once is also fun because the opening updates (remember-what-happened notes) aren’t really necessary. I already remember what happened. At times I found the short sections focused on a different person were a little too short and didn’t seem to do enough to advance what was happening. At other times, while it said it focused on a certain character the narration talked about other characters that were in the same scene more than the person it was supposed to focus on (and not really with their reaction), which is a weakness in some spots. However, given the thousands of pages that this novel spans, those are minor weaknesses. I highly recommend the series to anyone who loves a good romp through space.