I was clued into the Hostile Takeover trilogy by this Big Idea piece over on Whatever. It sounded like a fun book to investigate– a anarchical paradise in the middle of a huge confederacy. I was limited by the local library’s supplies however.
Partisan is the second book in the series. The local library doesn’t have books one and three, so that’s where I jumped in. The book is written well as a semi-stand alone; while it’s clear that the characters have had some recent and strong shifts in relations [in book one], their current situation is clear. The book suffers a bit as a mid-trilogy book, since the main plot is a traditional middle book “the recent victory only defeated a small arm of the overall plot”. There are a lot of strings that lead forward, implying that the last book integrate those loose threads and drive to an explosive conclusion. This book certainly primed me to look for the last book in the trilogy [Revolutionary]– or to buy the whole trilogy (which I now see is reprinted all under one cover).
The characterization was a little flat– the big swings don’t seem grounded in the character as developed in this book– but I can understand that the character grounding was developed in the first book. In general, I liked the book, and look forward to seeing what he’s doing now.