At the Sign of Triumph: A Novel in the Safehold Series

This series started with such promise. It was amazing, sensational!

It ended with a whimper, not a bang.

The ultimate problem is in David Weber's planning for the series. He clearly did not look far enough ahead to see what it would be like to read about the incredibly stupidly overpowered advantages he gave "The Good Guys". The last three books have basically been a repeated exercise of watching whole armies or fleets slaughtered over and over again with no chance to defeat the "Good Guys".

If you like reading about new and innovative ways to shoot fish in a barrel, you'll like it, maybe.

I just finished reading this ninth volume of what started out as a promising and original saga. Unfortunately, subsequent volumes were progressively weaker - too slow, too pretentious, and too many cardboard characters. The story also became more and more improbable with technology progressing in less than a decade from galleys to pre-dreadnought battleships making 25 knots on a planet much too big for practical warfare. Still, there was a good core to the story: a much cleaner and simpler version of the Reformation than in our history coupled to rapid modernization and technological advance. No doubt, this is why the series reached nine volumes and this last one is "only the end of the beginning," with an apostolic visit pending, the mystery of the Zion basement unresolved, and the conquest of space and the Gaba far in the future. This series could have been top notch in three volumes and if the author reverts to the style of his younger days future volumes of the Safehold series may well become best sellers and classics. Meanwhile, however, I am not planning to read Volume 10.

Do not get me wrong. I think Weber is one of the best authors out there and have thoroughly enjoyed just about all of his books. The Safehold series is one of my favorites along with the Honor Harrington books. I was very disappointed with the abrupt ending of this novel. Not since S.M. Sterling shut down the " Island In The Sea Of Time " series have so many loose threads been left dangling at the conclusion of a book. I suspect will hear from Merlin again and perhaps some of the descendants of Safehold's principal characters, but a couple of hundred more pages would have certainly eased the transition to a future Safehold. Their addition could have been balanced by eliminating a hundred or so pages from this novel prior to the concluding chapters. Some better editing might have done the trick.

Weber seems to have really lost perspective. He writes too much about a whole bunch of characters and details that I don't want to hear about, and almoat nothing about the characters he started the series with.
He fills chapter after chapter with the same land battles from the last few book, but compleatly skips the details of the ending.
The honorverse books have been suffering as well, go back to focusing on a few of the original characters, now the billion more you added later.

A decent end to a series that went on for too long. I agree with some people that the ending felt rushed, but that's better than the snails pace at which the last couple of books crawled along.
The problem is that however well done it is, by now David Weber's formula is just painfully obvious and the books are just too repetitive.
About one hundred pages of this book is just characters standing around agreeing with each other, or making complimentary small-talk about how skilled and competent their junior/senior officers are and how much they appreciate that. Someone will make an remark in 'mock severity', while another character proclaims their innocence with their 'eyes twinkling', saying they have no idea what the other person is talking about.
Something unexpected will happen, but the heroes will persevere and overcome it, with everybody working hard and managing to exceed expectations and do better than anyone hoped. Thanks to the plucky work of a sergeant with far too many 'y's in his name, they'll uncover what the enemy is planning just in time to find a way to beat it.

It's agonising to go through each one of those same conversations twenty times in every single book.

Let's not forget the same phrases being used multiple times per book as well. Something difficult is a 'copper-plated bitch', while the heroes anticipating the destruction or major setback of their enemies have a smile as 'cold as winter/a glacier/ice', or 'a smile a kraken would envy/be proud of'. While these are fine phrases, they are overused so heavily that it becomes jarring and irritating to keep coming across them.
There is never any danger of the Charisians losing the war, and while that was understood and perfectly fine in the first half of the series, due to their secret, hyper-advanced technology, by this point it has just become fairly boring. The novelty of such an interesting setting has long since worn off. Part of what makes this book better than the last couple is that things don't all go in favour of the heroes and they start taking casualties.
You could probably shave at least an hours reading time off this book by not giving every name a weirdly drawn out pronunciation, with spelling to match, so the reader has to spend a second or two just mentally translating what the name is meant to be every single time they read it.
For all that, though, the last third of the book rolls along at a good pace, which leaves me with a better impression of the book than I got from the first two thirds.
Although this isn't truly the end, simply the end of this saga, as David Weber mentions in the Author's Note that Merlin Athrawes still has a roll to play, presumably finding out what form the 'Archangel's Return' will take in ten or twenty years time, and then advancing humanity to deal with the Gbaba. I'm not sure I'll be able to handle that, especially if the sequel series ends up as long and drawn-out as this one, but maybe the change in setting will result in a change of pace. I'm hopeful, anyway.

I was very disappointed. The series starts strong and manages to retain that for nearly all of the books. However, the deeper into the story we get the more random runoffs we get, the longer the warfare diatribe gets and the less climatic the book wrapups. This book, however, took the runoffs to a new level and the author used too many "pat" conveniences to arrive at a hurried, frayed ending. I assume there will be more books in the series but the primary story across NINE books was wrapped up, in a weak and boring manner, in about 90 pages. I love David Weber and have read most if not all of his books. This one was very low on the list for me.

Much better than the last couple books, too bad Weber still likes to ramble along. Minor spoiler below...

The ending was so frustrating. They won the war, the bad guys got what they deserved. But... But we still have no frigging clue what's underneath the temple. Instead of leaving a note saying a full glossary would take up too much room, how about you finish a story David?! Why do I keep buying his books?

Who are these characters that have taken over a series I used to really like? They are bland non-entities with too many twists in their names and a ruthless desire to bore me to death. How many times can we have a group of people sit down and agree with each other, at length, about how to completely destroy an unimaginably vast enemy of helpless, albeit frequently noble, fools fighting with the tools of the past who are led to their ruin by some sad sort of parody of an evil tyrant? There are so many of these characters that Weber refused to document their unlooked for oversupply by NOT enclosing a character list this time.
To give the devil his due, the story did begin to move forward right around page 700, but the going til that point was slow and tedious. Then the book suddenly ended, with several story-lines hanging out the window, blowing in the wind with no resolution.
I am not sorry to see the story end, I just wish it could have died a more dignified death.

In recent books of the Safehold series, Weber has suffered from verbal diarrhea. The latest volume, At the Sign of Triumph, is far too long. His descriptions of the military campaigns suffer from the lack of maps. The one in the front of the book is inadequate. Without maps descriptions of strategies, battles and campaigns are confusing and incomplete. Finally, the latter portion of the book wasn't proofed properly. I found several omissions of words and use of the wrong word.

I liked it. But.... according to David, supposedly there is another book in this series coming out? For anyone following this series, it *could* have ended with this book. Not well, and not completely. The ending seemed rather rushed. And.. without giving anything away, the cover has NOTHING to do with this book. In fact, up until nearly the last chapter, I kept wondering what was going to be happening to have the assault shuttle come into play and was very confused near the end when there was no mention of it or scene in which it might be used. It wasn't.
So.. I *think* I'm looking forward to the next (last??) book of this series by my favorite author.
Two items of note: This is a VERY long book and includes a LOT of unnecessary pages of people strategizing as well as a BUNCH of BRAND NEW characters that have minor parts that weren't either all that interesting or required for the story. Most of the action wasn't that interesting for some reason. I also didn't feel any real connection with any of the characters. It seemed like much of the book was written by someone else entirely.
I have to recommend it though, especially of you're a fan of the series, since it's a must read to connect to the next (and probably, *hopefully?* last book of this series. Unless they get off planet and face the Ghaba or do some other interesting actions.