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mburnamfink 's review for:
Under One Banner
by Graydon Saunders
The Commonweal is back, with a new character. Eugenia is a student sorcerer who's suffered a near-fatal brain injury attempting an external working from the characters from the prior two books (Edgar, Dove, Zora, etc. I saw someone else refer to them as Team Awesome and that's going to stick). She's got less than a year to live before the dead section of her brain kills her, but she's lucky. The rest of her class died immediately.
Eugenia just wants to be useful to the Commonweal in her remaining life, and fortunately, Team Awesome is on hand to patch her up so that the next time she bumps her head on something she won't die. She gets assigned to the Shot Shop, making artillery and shells for the Second Commonweal, and we learn a lot more about the next generation of weapons available.
And this is where the book is most fun, because frankly, those weapons are awesome! (As an aside, the cover photo is one of my favorite images, a National Geographic picture of a MIRV test at Kwajalein atoll. I had a poster of it for years). Eugenia takes the experimental battery out to some wastelands for test firing and runs into more guys from Reems. The hostile nation is on the march, or more accurately, on the run from a power that is eating them. Commonweal diplomacy does not do much for second chances. Squid rounds (made from demons, turns landscape into writhing mass of tentacles) encourages the hostile force to march to the wrong location. Then they're annihilated at point-blank range of 12 km by red-red shot, which is the kind of thing where if the battery didn't have a ward up they'd also have suffered a fatal sunburn. That MIRV cover photo is entirely appropriate.
More stuff happens. Fan favorite character Grue wanders into another group of guys from Reems and dies in a way that Team Awesome can't bring her back. There's a lot of handwringing about the ethical limits of the Commonweal and its Independents.
Again, either you like The Commonweal or you don't. I still do, and while this book doesn't cover a lot of new ground, it goes back to the military fiction of The March North and moves more briskly than books 2 and 3.
Eugenia just wants to be useful to the Commonweal in her remaining life, and fortunately, Team Awesome is on hand to patch her up so that the next time she bumps her head on something she won't die. She gets assigned to the Shot Shop, making artillery and shells for the Second Commonweal, and we learn a lot more about the next generation of weapons available.
And this is where the book is most fun, because frankly, those weapons are awesome! (As an aside, the cover photo is one of my favorite images, a National Geographic picture of a MIRV test at Kwajalein atoll. I had a poster of it for years). Eugenia takes the experimental battery out to some wastelands for test firing and runs into more guys from Reems. The hostile nation is on the march, or more accurately, on the run from a power that is eating them. Commonweal diplomacy does not do much for second chances. Squid rounds (made from demons, turns landscape into writhing mass of tentacles) encourages the hostile force to march to the wrong location. Then they're annihilated at point-blank range of 12 km by red-red shot, which is the kind of thing where if the battery didn't have a ward up they'd also have suffered a fatal sunburn. That MIRV cover photo is entirely appropriate.
More stuff happens. Fan favorite character Grue wanders into another group of guys from Reems and dies in a way that Team Awesome can't bring her back. There's a lot of handwringing about the ethical limits of the Commonweal and its Independents.
Again, either you like The Commonweal or you don't. I still do, and while this book doesn't cover a lot of new ground, it goes back to the military fiction of The March North and moves more briskly than books 2 and 3.