Tag Archives: hugh howey

All Molly, all the time!

For the last little while I’ve been consumed with finishing the Bern Saga books by Hugh Howey. I gave this series a go based on my love of Mr Howey combined with the fact that Amazon offered them to me for the bargain price of 2.99 a piece (we’ve spoken about my love of bargains before, haven’t we?)

Molly initially struck me as one of those great characters that, while embodying the ‘specialness’ required of a title character, also felt ordinary, flawed and regular enough to be real. She’s a gifted galactic pilot and navigator, but at the same time she’s still a seventeen year old girl – she gets crushes and cries at inopportune moments and wants to be selfish. While the lead characters are young, I’m not sure I’d specifically call this a YA novel – rather it seems that it would appeal to a broad audience. The books actually seem to mature with each instalment, as if the narrative matures along with Molly – the time span of the narrative is short, but Molly’s experiences ensures she grows up quickly. She’s so young, but she’s got the weight of the galaxy on her shoulders.

Hugh Howey has a great imagination. His alien creations (the lawless Palans, the feared Drenards in the endless twilight of their twin-sunned home planet, the scaled rough-and-ready Callites, refugees on the frontier planet Lok) are all complex and awesome and I was awed by the world-building. He’s got a real gift for it and discovering the world worlds (and non-worlds) along with the crew of the Parsona was a real joy.

Faults? In the first instalment, Molly Fyde and The Parsona Rescue has a number of spelling and grammatical errors. This problem does not follow through to the later books in the saga which was satisfying. There was another thing that kind of bothered me, and I expanded a little on it here before deciding to actually explore it more fully in a blog post later on. It’s a little spoilery, so watch out for that.

The thing I liked the most about this series was that something was ALWAYS happening. Sometimes the description of the action got a little muddled for me, so I would need to slow down a little a really pay attention. The action came that thick and fast and events were always racing. There was a great deal of daring escapes and close calls. The series also features a number of great, complex female characters that I loved: Molly herself, Anlyn Hooo, Cat the Callite in the later books. While it did take me almost a month to get through all four, it really was a great way to read it – I felt along for the grand adventure, and everyone knows how much I love an epic exploit.

Have you read the Bern Saga? Did you enjoy it as much as I did?