“Nicole Hammond was just trying to survive on the streets of Philadelphia, then she and her partner Bungie were abducted by a race of mysterious moth-like aliens and taken to a strange ship called the Fyrantha.
Now she is a Sibyl, a special human that has the ability to communicate with the aliens and their ship, and no one is happy. Competing factions control different parts of the Fyrantha with the humans and other sentient aliens caught in the middle. But Nicole is done being bullied, and now she has a plan to take control of the ship. She just has to outsmart war profiteers and slavers to do it.”
Title: Knight
Series: The Sibyl’s War #2
Author: Timothy Zahn
Page Count: 336
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: 4.0/5.0
Date Read: August 13th, 2022
| This was a solid follow up to book one of the series. I originally picked a couple of these up on sale as I recognized the author. They have been good books to read as a break from epic fantasy or science fiction reads though. Book two picked up right where the first left off. I was honestly feeling some deja vu at first. It was really beginning to feel like a simple reskin in the first quarter of this book. I’ll explain that a bit more in detail later in a spoiler area of my review. But after that things definitely took a turn and this book became a different story continuing on from the first. I feel the pacing of the story was on par with the first. We have some good mix of action along with simple dialog and story telling. We meet some new character and learn quite a bit more about those already introduced in the previous book. This isn’t one of those non-stop action type of reads but there is more than enough to keep a reader interested. The world build was done well again. Granted we are still on the same ship we were on in the first book, but we begin to explore a lot more of it. Again I don’t want to give to much away in this section of the review but the ship is large enough to have several different feelings or vibes depending on the part the characters are in during the story. I feel the character development is probably the strongest of the three main areas I usually discuss. As I mentioned earlier we continue to learn more about the previously introduced characters. We get to know them and their pasts more as well as seeing them grow during this story. We also have quite a few new characters introduced which continues to make things interesting in a story like this as well. All in all I’ve been enjoying this series for the reasons I gave above. These are just fun, easy, short novels to read through. I still have one more on the shelf to round this trilogy out. I should be able to get to this in the next month or two. World Building 4/5 Pacing 4/5 Character Development 4.5/5 |
I just wanted to mention a couple of the points I really enjoyed about this book. Early on in this one we begin to get hints that Khakista isn’t as big and dumb has he has being coming across as. We meet some more Ghorfs and as the book progresses we find out there are so much more to Khakista and his fellow Ghorfs! I love the fact that this community/race has found a way to grow and exist in this environment right under the noses of the Shipmasters and perhaps even the ship itself.
We get several messages from this book as my takeaways. The first being that some people just can’t change their ways. This obviously has to do with the reintroduction to Bungie in book two. But who knows maybe he’ll finally turn things around in the final book! We also get to know different views of slavery. As the Ponngs are willing to offer themselves to Nicole as her slaves for a chance to survive. We also get a good feeling of how Nicole feels about this. As she certainly wants to help them but also help the others races involved including all human life back on Earth. Finally after the final battle we finally admit the risks of simply being involved in these arena fights even if we aren’t trying to kill or hurt anyone. It might be just as dangerous or even more so if the Shipmasters think of humans not just as fighters but as leaders who can convince others to fight!
Speaking of the ending of book two I was really shocked how willing or cooperative the Shipmaster was being with Nicole and her demands. Though just a few pages later we find out that might not be entirely true and now we feel the Caretaker has been compromised and Nicole and the rest of the crew appear to be even more on their own. Hopefully she and they have learned enough this point so continue to learn how things can be done without the Caretaker’s help!
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