Smashed it out the park

Was worried about the transition from constant wartime to peacetime but David Weber smashed it out the park!

Can't wait for book 11

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Overall an entirely pointless exercise

This story is over 30 hours of pointless filler. The entire plot of this story is 'things that happen between the end of the last book and the start of the next'. Without exaggeration this entire book could have been condensed into the epilogue of the last book or the preface of the next novel.

A summery of the plot is simple, time moves on, some nations that you would expect to prosper after the war do not do so well, some nations you would expect to collapse do surprisingly well. Characters grow older, some die, and children become adults.
Thing that is going to be the centre of the next story arc happens in the last chapter. The end.

Aside from the pointless nature of the story the execution feels so forced that the novel has no flow or consistency. One thing I have noticed with Webers novels of late is he lets the plot drive the characters rather than the other way around. Several previously young and healthy characters suffer from plot related heart attacks, and they are all heart attacks, leading to the collapse of previously strong or driven factions all for the purpose of setting up the authors next plot idea, meanwhile 90 year-old's continue strong because killing them will not advance the all important plot.
Meanwhile surviving characters seem to have no actual impact on the world outside of what the plot demands, Characters invest massive amounts of money into an economy to shore up its stability if the plot says it works then it works, if the plot says it fails then it fails.
This novel contributes nothing to the overall story that could not have been imparted in 2 or 3 chapters of catch-up material in the next book, instead we need to wade through hours of flowery prose explaining how the world need to change to make the next book work.

The Audible exclusive error was on the part of the narrator, so many words are mispronounced that it took several listens to work out some names and places based on story context. And it was not just the alphabet soup of story specific names and places that he was getting wrong, several common words where used ether incorrectly of just mispronounced. The narrator consistently mispronounce Terran as Terrain, something that just kept throwing me out of the story.
A few posts from the narrator indicate he was given a pronunciation guild in the leadup to recording however that guild was filled with inaccuracies and he was specifically instructed to use the Terrain pronunciation over the correct Terran.
My best guess on the errors is David Weber is known to use dictation software to write his novels and he has taken to using some very strange pronunciations to help the recognition software deal with made-up or uncommon words. If this phonetic guild was used that might explain the garble of words through out the story.

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