The Last Best Hope

You know when the review starts with the lines “I wanted to like this book......” It ain't going to be good! Well, I did genuinely want to like this book, that is why I bought it, but I didn't.

The book charts Picard's unimaginable task of relocating the Romulan Population before their star goes supernova and destroys their galaxy. Throughout the story, Picard has to battle the Romulans and their utter psychopathic need for secrecy, the beauroracy of the federation and the growing anti romulan sentiments on earth that could ultimately lead to the collapse of the federation.

Throughout the book, there is a recurring quote used to highlight the scale of the task - “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!” And I have got to say that is how I tackled this book. I just couldn't get on with it. I didn't like most of the characters, couldn't care less about the impending disaster and thanked the lord when the end came.

The characters that annoyed me the most were Bruce Maddox and Agnes. When he finally tells her at the end of the book to “Shut the f-bomb up”, I thought, “I know it's not nice, but I couldn't agree with you more”

There are some interesting insights into Romulan culture that I quite liked, but for me I couldn't wait till the impending supernova finally blew up.

How do I review this book? The writing is fantastic. It keeps the flow going and brings the voices of the characters to life. My one complaint is that I don't particularly care for current day swearing showing up more. Especially the f-bomb. I like Star Trek without it. This book did not have many, but it feels awkward to hear a member of a non-human race using it.

I enjoyed getting the a glimpse into the histories of Raffi, Dr Jurati, and others. I would like to have learned the story behind the two Romulans who are employed by Picard at his vineyard, but the book doesn't go there. This book sets the stage for the first episode of Picard and would likely feel incomplete without the television series to follow.

I like Star Trek books in general, even if there is a figurative reset button at the end of each. This one is a bit more than that though and expands upon the cast of characters and fleshes them out more than the show could have.

It's debatable whether what I'm about to say is a spoiler or not, but I'll do a tag just in case. I'm unsure why, but I wasn't expecting it to end on a depressing tone for the most part. I somehow got lost in Picard's optimism and felt saddened by Picard being like "burned Icarus". Even characters that were created specifically for this story, like Vritet, I couldn't help feeling sad for in the end.

I'm not sure exactly what I expected from this book. I knew it was intended to serve as background material for the new Star Trek: Picard series, and I knew it dealt with how and why Jean-Luc left Starfleet – the book did fulfill those small expectations. But what I did not expect was that the story itself would be so darn depressing – not what one (or, at least this reader) expects from the franchise. In the past, Star Trek (in almost all of its incarnations) has been more about inspiring stories, of overcoming what seem at the outset to be insurmountable difficulties, but ultimately providing an uplifting conclusion to whatever tale is being told. With a title such as “Last Best Hope” I did expect that to continue but I was quite disappointed to see this was not going to be the case. I can only hope that the series itself provides that positive approach, because it certainly was not present in this book. The author did do a fairly decent job with the characters (both familiar and new) and the prose itself was well-formed and easy to consume. It's just that the thing being consumed was not one that left a good taste. Earl Grey, cold.

As a prequel story, it leads—as it must—to the terrible down note that begins the series, which results in a disappointing conclusion here. The book itself is reasonably well-written, and attempts to illuminate the backstories of some of the new characters that populate the series. Somewhat inexplicably, unless I glossed over it somewhere, there's no mention of Laris until the epilogue, which seems a glaring omission.