From Product Description:

I've been finding David Weber's recent books to be like Seinfeld's premise. It is a lot of words about nothing. I don't know whether it was Jim Baen's editing or kick-bu** publisher/author attitude which made Weber's old books such a joy to read. However, after Baen's death, all of David Weber's novels have read like a Bill Gates novel. The books are like technical documents that goes on forever. You get a 3 inch thick book, I suppose.

If you recall those physics textbook graphs showing a moving ball falling under the influence of gravity, you get a pretty good idea of how this series has gone. From an outstanding first novel and a very decent second novel, we have "progressed" to an extremely disappointing fourth novel. <br /> <br />Many reviewers have pointed to the lack of action, the endless meetings and characters recapping what they have done, what they plan to do, and what they think other characters have done. One other extremely tiresome feature that has reached a crescendo is how overwhelmingly, relentlessly and suffocatingly NICE the good guys are. They wouldn't say s**t if they had a mouthful of it. They are never grouchy, certainly never ill-tempered and wouldn't dream of being anything other than unfailing polite and courteous. In a word, they're totally boring. <br /> <br />It is generally agreed that one feature that contributes to effective story-telling is where the protagonists can overcome their weaknesses and faults to achieve heroic results. No problem here - the worst fault anyone displays is sleeping in a little once a month. <br /> <br />This could have been a great and memorable series, but Weber has taken the easy way out and automated his word processing production by jettisioning plot and characterization. <br />

I agree with many of the reviews. At the end of the book I was wondering why I bothered to buy it, why I bothered to read it to the end, and whether I'd bother buying another of Weber's books. <br /> <br />As best I can tell, Mr. Weber is enjoying building a history of Safehold using parallels from the history of the Earth with a little supermodern tech thrown into the mix. It worked very well in the first book of the series but at this time it has started to feel unfocused. This is not to say that it IS unfocused as I'm sure Mr. Weber understands exactly where he is going and why, but it is not a focus about which I care. <br /> <br />You get a sort of future history (with a dollop of alternate history) developing on Safehold with an immense amount of verbiage about the innate qualities of the various characters and how the other characters do or do not perceive that character. I'm sorry, I'm getting bored even writing about this. . . There are a fair number of attempts to handle the various emotional states and interactions between the characters but they are almost universally awkward and interrupted with explanations from Mr. Weber about why they feel or behave as they do. <br /> <br />Net effect is that you read a book that covers months of Safeholdian history and you feel like you were reading for months or years. As a matter of fact, it DID take me months to read it - I found it remarkably easy to stop reading the book and instead do or read something else. <br /> <br />Overall, an unsatisfying read. Since I had the Kindle version it was even worse as the formatting was problematic on virtually every page.

I am a huge fan of David Weber. Pretty much read all of his work. As we know, in its most basic form, a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The Safehold series is really stuck in the middle and needs to find an end fast. I found myself flipping 30% of the pages of "A Mighty Fortress" without bothering to read them. I think David Weber has set the story up pretty well with all of the main characters clearly defined and developed. Now he needs to bring the story to a final climax in a final novel.

This isn't Weber's best, but it's not a bad story. Unfortunately the constant shrugging gets annoying very quickly.