Chapter By Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
Well, I’ve reviewed a couple issues of the Blackthorne comic, the few issues I have of the Dark Horse miniseries, the cartoon, and the gamebook based on the cartoon (that was for The Clutter Reports, my other site) so since I’ve only played the demo of one game this is the last of the media I have on the BattleTech franchise. It was through the show that I became interested in the stories of the franchise though not playing the game itself due to my having the wrong personality to take part in a game where I’m only one voice among many storytellers. (I think that’s why kids didn’t want to play any games involving playing a character with me. My storyteller instincts come up with a story and my brain was thinking of them more as actors in my story than fellow storytellers, which is not good for role-play.) I liked the show so that brought me to the game book (which I though was a guide to the show although I was aware of the game thanks to ads in my childhood comics, which I think I mentioned in the reveal).
Now we head for the prologue and first chapter of our seventeenth book in this review series. I think I enjoyed it when I first read it but we’ll see if that happens this time as well. What I’m hoping for going in is at least enough explanation of the story to benefit new readers who may be experiencing this universe for the first time. Yes, the show was popular and the game was created in the 1980s but that was a cartoon and a role-playing game, niche crowds compared to book readers. This also wasn’t Robert Thurston’s first BattleTech novel so he may forget every story is potentially someone’s first. The prologue and chapter one are a combined 12 pages, so this may be Tom Clancy’s Op Center all over again. The chapters also start in a similar fashion, with location and time instead of a proper chapter name. So let’s see how this goes before we’re done. Prepare for multiple chapter reviews, thus ruining the title of this article series again. Time to begin.
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