Teaser

As a young child, Molly was one of a handful to survive a Covenant bombardment of her world. Now a teenager, she is relocated to a scientific outpost, where her schoolmates are the very aliens she hates so much . . .

Review

When it comes to child protagonists in adult fiction, authors find themselves in a bit of a Catch-22 situation. Since authors are, with very few exceptions, adults themselves who are writing for an adult audience, it’s all to easy to make a child protagonist little more than a smaller version of an adult. A person who speaks, thinks and acts like an adult. This is of course unrealistic, as children are radically different to their older selves. But it’s often a necessary unrealism to create a character to which adults can relate. Because on the other side of the coin you have the realistic child character. A child who is miraculously everything a real child would be. Unfortunately, real children are incredibly annoying. Thankfully I’m at an age where I don’t have to deal with them in real life, and the less time I spend reading about them, the better.

Age of the protagonist aside, there was another factor that was always going to make me less interested in Legacy of Onyx than other books. The school setting. I loathe and despise school settings. I won’t touch dark academia with a barge pole, and if training can be achieved through a montage, all the better. I’ve done my time in school, and frankly am glad to have it behind me. So having a whole book about a sixteen year old girl adjusting to a new school? It didn’t interest me. Thankfully, some aliens arrived in time to liven things up before my attention wandered to far.

Legacy of Onyx continues the tradition of Halo novels bringing greater depth to the Covenant. In particular, the Grunts get a lot of detailing here, and it raises some very troubling issues about the Covenant engaging in the use of child soldiers. Having species that mature at different rates is simultaneously entirely logical, and also a little odd once you put them into a more rigorous academic setting. if an alien could live its entire life in twenty years, is it really logical to put them through school for most of that time? Also by this point in my Halo readthrough, I’m starting to remember the aliens by their species name, rather than the label applied to them by humanity in a state of war. Not Elites, but Sangheili, and so forth.

Despite facing an uphill battle as a result of its tropes, Legacy of Onyx was an entertaining read, and a rare example of a true standalone in an ever more interwoven shared universe.

Book Stats

• A Standalone Novel
• Published by Titan
• First published in 2015
• Military SF
• 356 pages