Rating: 
Summary: So disappointed after waiting so eagerly.
Review: I have read (and re-read) as well as listened to Patrick Tull's narrations of all the previous 19 volumes in the series and still find excitement, drama, and humor that makes me laugh out loud or say Huzzay! However this book was a great disppointment. It lacked the full involvement of many characters, the humor and the light-hearted exchanges between Aubrey and Maturin. Too much was conveyed through Stephen's over long letters to Christine. Without the war, the battle scenes were boring. I'm sorry to say that after skipping through page after page I finally put the book down and can't bring myself to finish it. But I still gave it 3 stars - O'Brian is the best writer of historical fiction to date and the first 19 novels will always be my favorites. I would love to see PBS do these stories in a television series.
Rating: 
Summary: Forgot to describe the action
Review: I have read,and bought all of the series. I was disappointed, when comparing with the others in the series. Much time is spent in describing minute details, but when it comes to action, such as the battle at the taking of the shore installation, it is all condensed into a few paragraphs. It is as if including the battle was an afterthought. Because it is a continuation of the series, it is worth reading, but is disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: What happened?
Review: I listened to the tape version. This was mistake number one, as another reviewer noted on this site. Mistake number two, also mentioned several times by other reviewers, was making this my virginal experience with this author. Frankly, I was totally lost. Maybe that freeway driving had something to do with it also (I listen in my car).I can tell from the other reviews that this is a series for special interest people only, and that the whole series should be digested, from the beginning, not from the end. Steven's love affair, such as it was, I couldn't understand. I did gather that he had a daughter and was a widower. And whatever happened to that young fellow, the lord's adopted son, who came on as the helmsman? Well, as I say, it was all just a little abstruse. But unlike one other reviewer, I thought the book was well read on the audio version. The reader didn't have a great diversity of voices, as some other readers do, but he did have passable accents for his Spanish and English characters. Also, I did learn something about the war between Peru and Chile. I was able, occasionally, to imagine being aboard the Surprise.
Rating:
Summary: What happened?
Review: I listened to the tape version. This was mistake number one, as another reviewer noted on this site. Mistake number two, also mentioned several times by other reviewers, was making this my virginal experience with this author. Frankly, I was totally lost. Maybe that freeway driving had something to do with it also (I listen in my car). I can tell from the other reviews that this is a series for special interest people only, and that the whole series should be digested, from the beginning, not from the end. Steven's love affair, such as it was, I couldn't understand. I did gather that he had a daughter and was a widower. And whatever happened to that young fellow, the lord's adopted son, who came on as the helmsman? Well, as I say, it was all just a little abstruse. But unlike one other reviewer, I thought the book was well read on the audio version. The reader didn't have a great diversity of voices, as some other readers do, but he did have passable accents for his Spanish and English characters. Also, I did learn something about the war between Peru and Chile. I was able, occasionally, to imagine being aboard the Surprise.
Rating: 
Summary: "...with fair winds and flowing sheets..."
Review: I picture O'Brian near the end, facing his mortality, wrestling ghosts from WWII, writing in a lonely room at Trinity College in his adopted Ireland, finishing what surely was a pure labor of love. We all grow old and we cannot expect the same writing strength from a man of 70 as from a man of 40. Nor can we expect to read the like of O'Brian again, as his generation will be the last to possess the combination of erudition, intellectual curiousity and a psychic link to the past that formed the life of his novels. Read O'Brian as an antidote to the values of the present. Read O'Brian to realize that there was a time in the recent past when, for many people, friendship, honor, love, learning, loyalty and courage were present in everyday life, and when expediency was not always the best policy. Read O'Brian for what is surely one of the greatest sustained efforts in literature, for 20 volumes that together form a novel that in style, lanuage and subject matter, could have been published contemporaneously with Dickens - and is yet timeless.
Rating:
Summary: is this patrick o'brian?
Review: i really can't believe Patrick O'Brian wrote this book
Rating:
Summary: Alter egos?
Review: I suppose we have to see Maturin and Aubrey as representing two sides of O'Brian's own way of looking at the world - not his personality: I don't think writing leads to so crude a self-identification as that. If that's so, then it makes sense to me of the darker, less committed feeling of the last two books. The death of the author's wife after so many years of close and happy marriage is bound to have affected the way he looks at the world, and it would have been surprising if these last two books were not elegaiac and downcast, full of loss and a kind of depression. I find that thought comforting in an odd way. The books up to The Hundred Days were so nearly perfect, so engrossing, that I was taken aback by 100 Days, which seemed at first so much less persuasive. I've just finished 'Blue' and although not up to the strength of the earlier books - how could it be? - it seemed to have taken a deep breath and begun to look around again at how things are. I too thought it was supposed to be the last. If it is, then Patrick O'Brian has played his last sly trick on his readers. But it doesn't read like it. They're not real people; but an author has to have some sense of resolution in his or her head, or the act of creation remains incomplete. I hope there will be a final, calmer closing when O'Brian, too, returns to harbour
Rating: 
Summary: A Good One
Review: I was pleased that this latest edition to the series was better than the last. No, not as good as those at the start or the middle but if you've read 19 so far, for goodness sake just be complete.
Rating:
Summary: On a much stronger tack than The Hundred Days
Review: I wasn't a great fan of the predecessor to this book (The Hundred Days) as it seemed that a lot of life had been sucked out of the series. I then re-read the set from Master and Commander to Blue at The Mizzen. While the books have changed somewhat, in that they have become less descriptive of the interrelationships between the characters, this is understandable. As Aubrey gets more senior (here for much of the time he is an acting Commodore with a small squadron) the books have to describe a much bigger naval and political picture. O'Brian excels at this. Unfortunately this means we lose some of the "small ship" feeling, and many of the best characters from earlier in the series are left out. Isn't this a function of life - not only Aubrey and Maturin's but also most readers? As we move on in the world relationships change and we interact with different people. In addition O'Brian would have difficulty in weaving in many old characters and maintaining the sense of historical accuracy that is important to his books (this is however not a justification for Aubrey's lack of response to Bonden's death in the previous book). Read the whole series from book one and then enjoy this and its predecessor (The Hundred Days). Both books then fall into much better context. Keep it up Mr O'Brian - you are doing an excellent job. I fervently hope that the unanswered questions surrounding Stephen and Christine Wood (as well as where Aubrey goes from here) mean that we can hope for one more (and preferably more than one) book and a couple of large fleet actions!
Rating:
Summary: Historical fiction doesn't get much better than this series.
Review: I'm reviewing, here, the entirety of O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, because I consider it to be essentially one novel. The first, and most astonishing, strength of this series is in its characterization. Not only are the contrasting, yet inseparable, friends Jack and Stephen believable, appealing, vividly human characters, but they change realistically through time. To the reader, they appear as "real" people with "real" lives, perhaps more so than some of the the flesh and blood ephemera around us. The secondary characters, too, shine -- Killick is priceless. Research, of course, is O'Brian's other great strength. It's not only the ships, about which he seems to know everything. There's no aspect of the period -- food, dialect, religion, music -- in which he does not seem to be well versed. And he conveys this information to the reader in interesting ways, rather than encumbering the text with massive info-dumps. One often overlooked bright spot in this series is its humor. Too often historical fiction has a self-consciously grim quality. O'Brian can be grim -- crushingly depressing, in fact --but... "Swiving Monachorum". Action and battles are not, strangely, this series' strongest point. When we get them, they're great, but too often they are skipped over or told in a distant third-person viewpoint. But the worst here is still very good indeed. I would recommend reading all of these, in order, starting with the first one, right away, as soon as you possibly can. It's true that The Hundred Days marks a low point -- I agree with the reviewers who cite O'Brian's loss of his wife as the reason -- but Blue at the Mizzen, under which I've posted this review, marks a triumphant return of the author's powers.
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