...remember I was reading this for a book club.  I should have been discussing frequently here on the dashboard.  I should be writing a good review.

 

Instead, I wolfed through this one, then book two and then immediately book three.

 

I did want more in the Honor-verse.  I hesitated to start this before was a bookclub because I wasn't confident author could write for YA.  

 

I was wrong; he did very well with YA.  Excellent book, but possibly a bit lacking in some ... not sure "tension" is the correct word.  Everything wasn't breezy and light; a few very possibly serious things just seemed a bit easily resolved with the M.C. often just that much smarter than others.  Most places that worked well; just enough off that it's not quite a five star read for me.

 

Boy did I ever want to read this early backstory of the treecat world!

This is Young Adult Sci Fi set on a frontier planet in the far future with a girl-meets-treecat first contact theme.

The split view from human to alien and back was well handled, the action scenes are dramatic and pack an emotional punch and the whole thing is carried along by the excellent performance from Khristine Hyam.

The book kept my attention and some scenes were very powerful but I don't think it fully delivered as a novel. I felt as though I'd had the first three or four episodes of the first season of a promising show and then the thing had been taken off air.

Still, I enjoyed the read and I've bought book two to see where David Weber takes his ideas and his characters

Just starting.  A favorite author -- but not one I would associate with YA.

 

For booklikes book club at http://booklikes.com/book-clubs/12/ya-book-club 

Twelve-year-old Stephanie isn't happy that her family has been relocated to the planet Sphinx. It's a dangerous and fairly recently colonized place, so her parents don't feel comfortable about letting her run around on her own all the time. In order to keep her occupied, Stephanie's mother gives her a mystery to solve: missing celery. Greenhouses and gardens all over Sphinx keep getting small amounts of celery stolen from them, and no one's been able to figure out who's been doing it. Stephanie's investigation leads to the discovery of a whole new sentient species, beings she ends up calling “treecats.” She forms an empathic bond with one particular treecat, Climbs Quickly, and becomes a fierce protector of her new friend and his clan.

I'm a fan of “telepathic/empathic animal companion” fantasy and sci-fi. I figured I knew what to expect from this book. Stephanie would go exploring, find and bond with a treecat, and eventually be in a position to save treecats from some sort of danger (which she inadvertently put them in, something I managed to guess only halfway through). And I suppose that's how this story went, but the execution was incredibly boring.

It took a while for Stephanie and Climbs Quickly to meet, but I didn't mind that so much. Since I had never read any of Weber's other Honorverse books, I was happy for whatever background info I could get before the story picked up steam. I loved the scene in the forest, when Stephanie and Climbs Quickly met for the second time and fought side-by-side, and I was looking forward to seeing their bond develop.

That was where things started to go bad, for me. The story skipped forward two years. Repeated references were made to an event in which some treecats were killed and many more were saved, but that event was never shown. A bit of googling tells me that it probably happened in a short story that can be found in the Worlds of Honor anthology, which is good to know, but I still felt cheated as I was listening to A Beautiful Friendship and wondering why this interesting and important event was being completely skipped over.

The book went on and on about things I had trouble caring about, like the specifics of settlement arrangements on Sphinx, background information about several new adult characters, and Stephanie's shooting practice. What I wanted were more adventures and a closer exploration of the deepening bond between Stephanie and Climbs Quickly, not great gobs of exposition. The one thing that kept portions of this book from becoming an absolute snooze-fest was Khristine Hvam's narration – she was pleasant to listen to and did a good job voicing the various characters, although I thought some of her treecat voices were almost cartoonish.

Everywhere I've looked, this book is categorized as YA. However, even if I hadn't already known that most of Weber's books were written for adults, I would have been able to guess it from the way this was written. Adult POVs were used far more often than in most modern YA books, and most of Stephanie's adventures felt either overly brief or very carefully managed by the adults around her.

All in all, A Beautiful Friendship was a bit disappointing, but I still wouldn't mind trying the next book. However, I find that I'm looking forward to Weber's Honorverse books for adults far more than I am the next book in this series.

 

(Original review, with read-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.)

This is another audiobook that's not really working for me - disappointing, since I had expected to love it. But it keeps going on and on about things I don't care about or that I already figured out, while skipping over the interesting stuff. For example, I knew the instant Karl appeared on the scene that he and Stephanie were probably going to become a couple at some point. I didn't really need the scene in which a couple adults stood around and talked about the potential for romance between Karl (15) and Stephanie (14) (Karl's a little in awe of Stephanie, and they've been spending a lot of time together while Stephanie learns to shoot), while also speculating that probably nothing will happen anytime soon (Karl is still getting over the death of the girl everyone had expected he'd eventually marry).

 

On an unrelated note: anytime food comes up the descriptions are so lovingly detailed that I want to cry. All I have in my office are Cheez-Its!