Rating: 
Summary: The Navy is unbelievable, wrecking the story.
Review: Once A Hero by Elizabeth Moon
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The first three chapters of this book appeared on the Web, courtesy of Baen books. These were so fun and so promising, that I haunted the book stores for two weeks until the novel was available.
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Unhappily the first three chapters are probably the best three chapters. Once A Hero, is the story of a young lieutenant in the Regular Space Service. She has just performed a great deed of heroism. She obtained command of a ship, due to treason and mutiny and counter mutiny. She then destroyed an enemy heavy cruiser saving an entire planet. Instead of honor and glory and a hero's welcome, Lieutenant JG Esme Suiza receives a Court Martial and a Board of Enquiry. Her superiors also asking "How did so mediocore a person as Lt. Suiza do so well?". Our hero, had not planned for , and truly does not want a glorious Navy career. She harbored no ambitions to command her own ship.
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The book is beautifully written. It has a clean, clear, elegant style, free of the extraneous reminisces and explanations. The societies and cultures are revealed in pieces as the story progresses, allowing the reader to assemble them like a furniture kit. While this story is set in the same universe as a previous trilogy it stands alone quite well.
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Unhappily the society revealed is a massive, old fashioned, rectangular library table with only three legs. There are some very silly discrepancies in this book. In one place, our hero claims to be the first person from her planet to serve in the Navy, in 200 years; in another place she mentions someone else having joined 30 years before. Early in the book, it is implied that she has some monetary resources besides her salary, later the reverse is suggested. These particular points are mere scratches on the table, annoying but not critical.
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The real problem lies with the Navy. Through out most of the book it appears to be a completely competent and professional organization. The legal proceedings, the Court Martial and the Board of Enquiry, are done in a fair, established, professional manner. The further glimpses of Navy actions and procedures, also show a competent military force, easily holding its own against smaller but still dangerous opponents. ( New Paragraph )
After the Board of Enquiry, Lt. Suiza is sent to a new post. The new assignment is on a ship that closely resembles a fairly large space station. This artifact contains 25,000 people and is a major Navy research, repair and resupply facility. ( New Paragraph )
This extremely valuable, very heavily manned facility is attacked. The Navy becomes a group of disorganized, inexperience, untrained, unprepared fools. Twenty five men are pulled from a damaged Navy vessel. No one notices that these people are completely uninjured despite blood on their uniforms. Without verifying identification, giving an orientation, or even checking with an officer from the damaged vessel, these men are sent to various departments abourd the repair facility. When it is established that these men are all enemy agents, the Captain's first reaction is to consider self destruction. The Navy does not, it seems have established procedures for dealing with hostile intruders, for securing critical facilities ( life support, the bridge, the sole self destruct mechanism ), for denying intruders access to medical supplies like knock out gas, or weapons. The very large, very valuable space station does not have redundant facilities for life support, and weapons control and self destruction. It does not have a secure method of communication. It doesn't seem to have any sort of internal security force, or any method of preventing unauthorized personnel from moving freely, or any security system monitoring critical areas.
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The flaws in the Navy wrecked the book. The society revealed by a science fiction novel doesn't have to be nice, or admirable, or even perfectly consistent, but it does have to be believable.
Rating: 
Summary: Moon gives us another wonderful female military hero.
Review: Readers of Moon's Heris Serrano novels (Hunting Party,Sporting Chance, Winning Colors) will recognize thebattle of Xavier which Esmay Suiza is instrumental in winning -- after a mutiny against a treachorous captain which she survives as the highest ranking officer (Lt. J.G.!). Hero? Obviously. But how to explain her earlier mediocre career, technical track, lacking initiative? What else might Lt. Suiza be hiding?Esmay's not telling. For one thing, it's rude to tell people your family holds hereditary military control over an entire planet. And for another thing, she's only just starting to realize what she's been hiding so carefully from herself. Elizabeth Moon's novels almost invariably feature strong female protagonists, and this is no exception. The depiction of the Suiza family is good, and the depiction of how Esmay gradually learns to fit into Familias culture is even better. This novel is peripherally connected to the Serrano novels, but can be enjoyed without that background as well.
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Summary: good, but similar characterization and some discontinuties.
Review: The book of 'Once a Hero' was a good story, but is this book along with her other one's all the characters seem to say the same phrases, and uaually act in a similar manner. Also there is the subject of horses, throughout all the books in this particular series horses, and all to do with them was said to be unconventional, and never done, but it is shown time and again, that they use horses for more things in her futureistic universe than we do now. I'm not saying this is a bad book, quite the contrary. As a side note, in her new book 'Rules of Engagement' It was said near the end that everyone uses the metric system, and no other, but the characters still speek of things in feet, and miles.
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Summary: Good, honest space adventure.
Review: The hero of the story, Lt Esmay Suiza, appeared near the end of "Winning Colors". At that point she had just participated in a mutiny in which she was the senior survivor and followed it up with the destruction of the enemy flagship when the battle was all but lost. Starting at that point Moon takes us through the Captain's Board and the court-martial and then into a home-coming fraught with reprisals of early childhood trauma. Then things get interesting. In all Moon did her usual thorough job with the details of ships and their internal arrangements. The problems associated with the enemy boarding and the follow-up attempts to re-take control are well thought out and are completely consistent with my own experience with aircraft carriers and other large ships. One reviewer claimed that this was a flaw in the story. It is, in fact, the most realistic part of the story. Large ships are easy to take and difficult to hold. Underway there are no security guards, guns are locked up, no one is armed and nobody watches security monitors that closely. The worst problem with large specialty ships is that the crew forgets that it is part of a military organization, they get focussed on the job they do and forget the larger picture just like Moon depicted. On the down side, Moon went to extraordinary lengths to explain Suiza as a self-doubter caused by early trauma. This was unnecessary and detracted from Suiza's charm. In many ways Suiza's self-effacing manner and personality was a clone of CS Forrester's hero, Hornblower. Forrester did not try to explain Hornblower as the outcome of a rape, on the contrary, Forrester saw Hornblower the result of an extraordinary intellect hampered and enhanced by character flaws of one of the less common personality types. This is where Suiza should have remained. Other than that it was good fun and a good read. Hats off to the guy that EM credits with laying out the commando infiltration. He is certainly capable and perhaps should be convinced to try his hand a plotting something of his own. He's got Clancy's sort of mind
Rating: 
Summary: Space Opera
Review: This book is throughly enjoyable. It somehow reminds me of something in Tom Clancy books, that feeling of a well oiled armed forces, where individual talent and team play combine to produce the most effective results. This is a true Space Opera, with plots and intrigues on political, military and personal levels, and a sense of grandeur. Possibly my favorite Elizabeth Moon book, and, as a matter of fact, the book that made me an Elizabeth Moon reader.
Rating:
Summary: A hero that could have been you or me.
Review: This is a good SciFi novel, the beginning of a spinoff thread from the Heris Serrano stories. The hero is a competent officer that happens to survive a traitorous captain, takes her ship into combat, and helps to defeat an enemy attack. Esmay seems to be just anyone, nothing special or extraordinary. For me a great part of the story is watching Esmay discover that her terrible secrets are pretty common, and she can get help without having to give up her life. At the same time, we get to see that she is very conscientious, hard working, thorough, and well-studied. The message is clear -- anyone can succeed, but there are no shortcuts to success. The growth of a junior officer in an new environment -- a space-going shipyard -- is done well. I enjoyed meeting Esmay.
Rating:
Summary: A hero that could have been you or me.
Review: This is a good SciFi novel, the beginning of a spinoff thread from the Heris Serrano stories. The hero is a competent officer that happens to survive a traitorous captain, takes her ship into combat, and helps to defeat an enemy attack. Esmay seems to be just anyone, nothing special or extraordinary. For me a great part of the story is watching Esmay discover that her terrible secrets are pretty common, and she can get help without having to give up her life. At the same time, we get to see that she is very conscientious, hard working, thorough, and well-studied. The message is clear -- anyone can succeed, but there are no shortcuts to success. The growth of a junior officer in an new environment -- a space-going shipyard -- is done well. I enjoyed meeting Esmay.
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Summary: A great read!
Review: This is the first book I have read by Elizabeth Moon and it was wonderful. I am not into anything military, but this book was so good, that I will no longer let a military backdrop in a story stop me from considering the book. Good job Ms. Moon. I look forward to reading more of your work.
Rating:
Summary: a solidly crafted novel
Review: This is the first Elizabeth Moon book that I read. I got it shortly after I found out that Ms. Moon won the Nebula award this year. I was not disappointed. Once a Hero is an excellent read. The writing is compelling, the main character is very likable. There is no predictability, the storyline ebbs and flows sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly but always at a natural pace for the particular setting. I don't generally like the space opera subgenre and was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. I look forward to reading other Elizabeth Moon novels.
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Summary: I wil read more from Elizabeth Moon
Review: When I read Once A Hero, I searched through the book and never found a reference to it being a sequel to Winning Colors. Now I see it is a sequel to a trilogy. Well, I have plenty more reading to do now. This book introduced me to Moon and it looks like I am going to get to know her a little better. Some of the issues listed below by other readers don't seem to be the glaring plot holes they make them out to be. The guy that left Esmay's planet 30 years before got together with a member of fleet but it is never actually said that he joined fleet. The use of a mine and a commando unit simultaneously isn't that farfetched. The mine wasn't supposed to destroy the ship, just disable it. And I am sure the Blood Hoard would want to have soldiers on board to secure their disabled ship. And while I agree it always seems unreasonable that a small commando unit can infiltrate a secure area and pull off the unthinkable, it is something that they war-gamed and trained for. Granted the initial response of lets blow up the ship seems a little extreme, Moon did set some of this up by providing some history of this ship captain having multiple higher echelons giving him conflicting orders in a difficult command climate. It wouldn't have been my choice, but Moon is building an environment where something is rotten in the state of the Familias.
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