the personal journal of Brent Stewart
Mr. Midshipman Hornblower is book 1 in a series, written in the 1950s, about a British naval officer during the Napoleanoic wars. Each book captures his experience as he progresses in rank, with this first book focusing on his early career.
For fiction, I’m not going to give a detailed review of the book. I’m just going to answer two questions:
Yes. The main character is engaging, the stories are well told just foreign enough to require concentration, and the plotting is realistic. I breezed through this book in a few days, partly because it’s an easy read and partly because I didn’t want to put it down.
Yes. This is my first exposure to the series, so I can’t speak to where it goes from here, but I enjoyed this book. There’s a lot of jargon specific to a wooden sailing ship that will require some combination of imagination, research, and context to decypher, but it’s worth the effort.