First Contact (In Her Name: The Last War, Book 1) [Formato Kindle]

I disagree with a previous reviewer in that I found the battle scenes were handled way better than in the first book. I also like the way the characters were developed - in the first book, some of the characters had an almost ad hoc nature to them, as though they were added for complexity rather than as an aid to the storyline.

One thing I thought fell flat though, was the bit about the reproduction of the Kreelans. Males were seldom mentioned in the first book and never seen (one got the feeling that they didn't exist anymore), yet in First Contact, they not only exist, but also keep the population alive and growing. My feeling, after having read the first book, would be to have had a Brave New World type approach to reproduction.

In this book the reader feels an empathy with the humans, in the first book, I definitely had more empathy towards the Kreelans.

As advice to someone wanting to purchase this book, I would definitely read In Her Name (Omnibus Edition) before First Contact. You then have a better understanding of the Kreelan philosophy towards life and living and, of course, why Tesh-Dar is what she is.

As has been mentioned, once you start reading this book, it *is* very difficult to put it down.

By about 2/3 of the way through First Contact it had replaced Confederation as my favorite of the In Her Name books, granted this might change with Legend of the Sword but this is where I stand now. The book still feels like it is part of Hicks world but it also feels very different from the original Trilogy. Where as those books had a very Star Wars feel by the end First Contact felt more like Warhammer 40,000, which isn't a bad thing for a story that is more out right military Sci-Fi.

I really enjoyed the new characters that were brought into the mix and how detailed that battle got which is something that I felt was lost from the massive scale that was the first trilogy. While it took me a little while to get going on First Contact once I did I couldn't put the book down and was up till almost 3:30 last night finishing it off.

Like a good prequel it sets up the story for what is to come while building off of it, and not trampling on what made the original good, or filling the pages with massive retcons. Though knowing that this was written long after the First group of books, you can feel the tech seem to increase exponentially, due to one being written in the 90s and the other the 2000s, kind of like the Original Star Trek and Enterprise, but it wasn't horrifically distracting.

Can't wait to see where this trilogy goes with Legend of the Sword and then Dead Soul in the fall.

I recently read the In Her Name trilogy and thoroughly enjoyed it. It has just about everything that I enjoy in a good, epic space opera yarn. I even put it on one of my Listmania lists as a recommendation. When I finished and saw that there was a prequel, First Contact, also available I quickly bought it and started reading. I was really interested to see how it all started. So I was shocked when the book didn't measure up in any way to the trilogy. I kept thinking it was like someone else had written this book.

The writing was often convoluted, making frequent (extreme) use of asides set apart by dashes in the middle of sentences. While that can be the correct way to do things, the overuse (and sometimes misuse) was driving me batty. There are simply better ways to write. A similar thing was often done with dialogue, mixing up character action in the middle of what they are saying. Such things are not wrong to do, but should be done judiciously. In First Contact the frequency detracted from reading, and often confused things.

There were many sections of the book that got so tied up in explaining military or technical detail that I ended up just skimming several paragraphs or pages. I enjoy military SF, but the reader shouldn't be bogged down in minutiae, the story needs to keep flowing. There were also a couple places where things like the internet and blogging were mentioned. Hello? The story takes place something like four to five centuries from now.

The upshot is that I was very bored reading the first two-thirds to three-fourths of First Contact. While I raced through the In Her Name trilogy and could hardly put it down I had to force myself to finish First Contact. (To give an idea of how much I struggled with it, it took me as long to read First Contact as it took me to read the entire trilogy.) I did want to know what happened, it's just that finding out wasn't a very enjoyable experience.

I will say that most of the problems almost disappeared in the last part of the book. The writing was smoother, the pacing better, and the characters more involved and interesting. The last part of the book was reminiscent of my experience reading the trilogy and I actually did enjoy it and was glad that I had at least stuck with it. But if I had to do it all again I would not buy and read First Contact. It seems to me that maybe Hicks rushed to publish it and it didn't go through as much editing (and probably outside critiquing) as In Her Name, and the book seriously suffered for it.

I'm giving First Contact 2.5 stars because it's not nearly as bad as some books I've read that I rated as 2 stars, but it's also below average and thus doesn't earn 3 stars.