SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Citadel by Marko Kloos: https://t.co/VteiqL6pom
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 5, 2021
Short Review: 7 out of 10
1/3
Short Review (cont): The third book in the Palladium Wars Epic Space Opera series features two of our four main characters striking back at the mysterious underground groups looking to reignite war in the solar system. Good Characters but the plot remains WAY too slow.
— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) August 5, 2021
2/3
Full Disclosure: This book was read as an e-ARC (Advance Reader Copy) obtained via Netgalley from the publisher in advance of the book's release on August 10, 2021 in exchange for a potential review. I give my word that this did not affect my review in any way - if I felt conflicted in any way, I would simply have declined to review the book.
Citadel is the third book in Marko Kloos' space opera series, The Palladium Wars, which started with "Aftershocks" (Reviewed Here) and continued with last year's Ballistic (Reviewed Here). I really love Kloos' prose/writing style, which flows really well and makes his books incredibly easy for me to read - even though his main series, Frontlines, is military science fiction, a genre I don't particularly care for usually. The Frontlines series is now through 7 books, and I've really enjoyed most of them, but this second series, through 2 prior books, has been honestly frustrating. The characters and action sequences are good, but not enough happens in each volume, with certain obvious or important reveals being slow-played to the point of frustration. If it wasn't for my enjoying of Kloos' writing, I'd probably have dropped this series, so I was hoping book 3 would improve matters.
Book 3, Citadel, does not improve matters much. The series still focuses upon the same four characters, all of whom now react to some major events that concluded the last book, and while things do happen for all four of them, the book is still playing its reveals and secrets way too tightly to its chest. The result feels like episode 3 of a TV Show, which can leave you interested but wanting more, rather than the third volume of a book series, which is supposed to end in a way that is satisfying and completes some plot arcs, rather than just leaves you hanging. This series isn't expensive to obtain - if you have Kindle Unlimited you can get it for free as it's part of Amazon's 47North imprint - so there's a good chance that I'll keep trying book 4, but it's hard to recommend for the investment given how slow things go and how little there is here three books in.
Spoilers for book 1-2 are inevitable below:
----------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
5 Years after the Gretian war ended, the Gaia Solar System was supposed to be moving on.....but now that a nuclear strike has somehow been made by terrorists on civilians on Rhodia, the System is the center of renewed conflict....if only it could be clear who was responsible.
On Gretia, Pallas Colour Sergeant Idina has been reassigned to what is essentially baby sitting duty for bureaucrats and diplomats who don't understand the situation, as the Alliance occupation forces begin a new blockade of Gretia, seemingly ruining all their prior work of cooperation. And Idina soon finds she'll need to use her head to protect those bureaucrats from themselves, when the enemy strikes in a way to take maximum PR advantage of their new oppressive tactics.
Corporate heiress Solveig Ragnar also returns to Gretia and tries to resume her life by taking back some control from her controlling father, only to find him more pliable than he should be....and to find herself caught in the cross-fire between terrorists and the Alliance Forces.
Off Gretia, newly promoted Commander Dunstan Park of the Rhodian Navy finds himself desperate to hunt down the perpetrators for the strike on his home, and gets his chance when he finds himself assigned to a state of the art ship with AI, stealth and computing capabilities that could change everything about conflict forever.
Meanwhile Blackguard Aden and his crewmates find themselves hunted by the people who attempted to use them to transport a different nuclear weapon, and when their mysterious enemy strikes home, Aden and his crew decide their only option is to take the fight to the enemy, even if that means calling in the help of Dunstan and the Rhodian Navy....
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The most common way multi POV epic scifi/fantasy novels work is that there are a few point of view characters we start with, and that as the series moves on, we add more and subtract others, such that our story expands with new and revisited cast members. The Palladium Wars is not like that: we started with four point of view characters - Idina, Aden, Dunstan, and Solveig - who the story rotates through like clockwork (Aden -> Idina -> Dunstan -> Solveig) and we have stuck with them for now 3 books, such that this feels almost more like the telling of four individual stories than one big epic story at times. This isn't helped by the fact that the four characters rarely cross paths - Aden and Dunstan crossed paths last book and in this one, and Idinia and Solveig wind up nearby each other, even if they never interact directly, but in large part their stories are four separate ones.
And this is what makes this book feel slow, without too much happening. Dunstan and Aden's plots intersect, with Dunstan becoming Commander of an experimental vessel with enough tech to upset the balance of power and Aden's crew becoming bent on vengeance after one of they are attacked by the nuclear weapon traffickers who they backed out on last book - both wind up on a single mission to capture the ones responsible for the nuke, in what turns out to be a really fun confrontation taking advantage of both their ships' skills....but it's still just one mission for an entire book. Idina at least has TWO major events occur in her plotline, while Solveig only has one major event....and even there, she's just sort of a bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time*, rather than actually doing anything. This book's splitting of the narrative into four without being a particularly long volume, like its predecessors, means that there really isn't that much time for things to happen in any of those narratives, which is just frustrating.
*Well.....maybe
Nowhere is that more evident than in Solveig's story, which for three whole books now has felt basically pointless, like it could be replaced without losing anything else from the novels. Solveig never actually does anything that affects the major series-wide plot, other than occasionally wind up nearby and finally in this book, in one of the major battle confrontations....but again that's not due to her own doing as much as just bad luck (maybe). Her plotline has for three books essentially served to hint that her and Aden's father is involved with the mysterious antagonist faction, but still, even after this book, we haven't had her stumble onto this truth and it's just beyond agonizing to read. I'm fine with having a non proactive main POV character if that character's plot development is interesting, or if they give us a window into an interesting part of the world we won't see otherwise, but she doesn't provide either (she just feels like a naive good hearted privileged girl who knows how privileged she is, but can do little about it) and so I just wish she was replaced by someone else.
And that again is the issue with this series - we're three books in, and we still don't know what the deal is with the antagonists, even if the ending of this book promises we'll finally get some answers next book. This book features the antagonists getting some names: the force on Gretia becomes known as "Odin's Wolves" and the force in space as "Odin's Ravens", but hilariously, these names just come up in conversation as like something that's obviously known now out of nowhere, as if the groups made some sort of statement off page that was never revealed to the reader.
Like, I want to enjoy this series - Kloos' writing is easy to read and makes the book move quickly, Aden, Idina, and Dunstan are really fun and solid main characters (although the side characters among them are very forgettable) and Kloos writes some really great action scenes. But we're 3 books in, and we're still in what seems like the third episode of a twelve episode tv series, and that's just not good enough in a book series.
Off Gretia, newly promoted Commander Dunstan Park of the Rhodian Navy finds himself desperate to hunt down the perpetrators for the strike on his home, and gets his chance when he finds himself assigned to a state of the art ship with AI, stealth and computing capabilities that could change everything about conflict forever.
Meanwhile Blackguard Aden and his crewmates find themselves hunted by the people who attempted to use them to transport a different nuclear weapon, and when their mysterious enemy strikes home, Aden and his crew decide their only option is to take the fight to the enemy, even if that means calling in the help of Dunstan and the Rhodian Navy....
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most common way multi POV epic scifi/fantasy novels work is that there are a few point of view characters we start with, and that as the series moves on, we add more and subtract others, such that our story expands with new and revisited cast members. The Palladium Wars is not like that: we started with four point of view characters - Idina, Aden, Dunstan, and Solveig - who the story rotates through like clockwork (Aden -> Idina -> Dunstan -> Solveig) and we have stuck with them for now 3 books, such that this feels almost more like the telling of four individual stories than one big epic story at times. This isn't helped by the fact that the four characters rarely cross paths - Aden and Dunstan crossed paths last book and in this one, and Idinia and Solveig wind up nearby each other, even if they never interact directly, but in large part their stories are four separate ones.
And this is what makes this book feel slow, without too much happening. Dunstan and Aden's plots intersect, with Dunstan becoming Commander of an experimental vessel with enough tech to upset the balance of power and Aden's crew becoming bent on vengeance after one of they are attacked by the nuclear weapon traffickers who they backed out on last book - both wind up on a single mission to capture the ones responsible for the nuke, in what turns out to be a really fun confrontation taking advantage of both their ships' skills....but it's still just one mission for an entire book. Idina at least has TWO major events occur in her plotline, while Solveig only has one major event....and even there, she's just sort of a bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time*, rather than actually doing anything. This book's splitting of the narrative into four without being a particularly long volume, like its predecessors, means that there really isn't that much time for things to happen in any of those narratives, which is just frustrating.
*Well.....maybe
Nowhere is that more evident than in Solveig's story, which for three whole books now has felt basically pointless, like it could be replaced without losing anything else from the novels. Solveig never actually does anything that affects the major series-wide plot, other than occasionally wind up nearby and finally in this book, in one of the major battle confrontations....but again that's not due to her own doing as much as just bad luck (maybe). Her plotline has for three books essentially served to hint that her and Aden's father is involved with the mysterious antagonist faction, but still, even after this book, we haven't had her stumble onto this truth and it's just beyond agonizing to read. I'm fine with having a non proactive main POV character if that character's plot development is interesting, or if they give us a window into an interesting part of the world we won't see otherwise, but she doesn't provide either (she just feels like a naive good hearted privileged girl who knows how privileged she is, but can do little about it) and so I just wish she was replaced by someone else.
And that again is the issue with this series - we're three books in, and we still don't know what the deal is with the antagonists, even if the ending of this book promises we'll finally get some answers next book. This book features the antagonists getting some names: the force on Gretia becomes known as "Odin's Wolves" and the force in space as "Odin's Ravens", but hilariously, these names just come up in conversation as like something that's obviously known now out of nowhere, as if the groups made some sort of statement off page that was never revealed to the reader.
Like, I want to enjoy this series - Kloos' writing is easy to read and makes the book move quickly, Aden, Idina, and Dunstan are really fun and solid main characters (although the side characters among them are very forgettable) and Kloos writes some really great action scenes. But we're 3 books in, and we're still in what seems like the third episode of a twelve episode tv series, and that's just not good enough in a book series.
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