Book Review: In Her Name – Empire

This is a review of the eBook version of “In Her Name: Empire”; the first book of the In Her Name series written by Michael R. Hicks.

On a five-star scale, I’m giving this one four stars.  It probably deserves five stars, but I’m snatching one back simply because there were parts of it that made me, personally, uncomfortable.  If this were a literary review I would not do that, but this is me telling you how *I* felt about this book.

***No Spoilers***

This is an exciting, well-crafted read. It embraces a number of genres as the story goes along, but I’d classify it primarily as Sci-Fi.  The initial chapters are definitely Sci-fi as remnants of a defeated human population try desperately to fend off an alien invasion of their planet.  Our protagonist is a boy caught in the devastation.  The second scene is an orphanage planet established for youths like our protagonist who lost their families in the war.  It is a harsh environment, an alien place run by petty bureaucrats who think nothing of exploiting the children in their care.  

The next section steps out of standard Sci-Fi and into Fantasy as our protagonist is taken to live on a different planet, one where a warrior race trains to be warriors, and where everyone lives a medieval lifestyle even though they are a space faring race.  There is even a scene where the heroes must outwit a dragon.  I am not a big fan of fantasy and my enthusiasm cooled some as I got into this section, but the story is so well told and the characterization so strong that I kept on.

There is an element of the erotic/romance genre mixed in here that generated the uncomfortable feelings in my rather prudish conscience, but – again – though the scene was decidedly sexual, it was handled with enough tact I never reached the decision to lay the book aside.  By today’s “romance” standards it’s probably pretty tame (I would not know for sure I don’t read that stuff) but it was racier than I normally encounter in my reading.

I found nothing that impeded the flow of the story, no spelling or grammatical errors (I’m picky about these) no distracting word choices, no stilted language.  It was a smooth, pleasant read and an exciting tale.  There was one point in the story where the voice being used changed some, it became more literary or flowery and that did cause me to wonder what had happened, but it was not so discernible as to impede the story.

The story ended with a satisfactory conclusion that also leads the reader to want to buy the next book in the series, “Confederation” – which I have done and I look forward to getting started on it.  If you’re looking for a well-crafted story that will hold your interest as it steps neatly over standard genre boundaries and melds them into a single cohesive body of work, In Her Name: Empire is an excellent choice.