Teresa’s Book Review: Chaos Reigning by Jessie Mihalik

Chaos Reigning by Jessie Mihalik

Third volume in the Consortium Rebellion Trilogy

Jessie Mihalik has finished (for now) her space opera trilogy about the Consortium running the universe (not the galaxy; apparently our unimaginably vast galaxy — The Milky Way — doesn’t offer a big enough scope) and the von Hasenberg family.

There are six siblings in the von Hasenberg family and each volume to date focuses on a single sister. They find love, they discover who they are, and they move the plot forward.

Thus, book 1 Polaris Rising focuses on Ada von Hasenberg. She meets her genetically reengineered super-soldier, Loch, and we discover what a hyper-competent badass she really is. She’s able to keep up with him, which does not tone down her insecurities enough. Loch is remarkably like Vin Diesel in the Chronicles of Riddick so it’s understandable that Ada puts enormous time and energy into regularly rescuing him. Who wouldn’t want to rescue Vin Diesel? And have him offer you the traditional hero’s reward in exchange for rescue?

I would rescue Vin Diesel for a chance like that.

I got Polaris Rising through a BookBub deal so the price was right. I wrote a review for BookBub but it is lost to the ages. Let’s recap the most important point: I liked Polaris Rising enough to get in the queue for the second book, Aurora Blazing, at the library. Not, you note, enough to purchase Aurora Blazing. This is why our tax dollars pay for libraries. To make books available for everyone to share so we as individuals do not have to purchase and maintain 100,000-volume book depositories in our homes. Far more books get published because we have libraries. If we didn’t have libraries, many books like Ms. Mihalik’s opus might remain unwritten and unpublished.

Polaris Rising set up the Consortium Trilogy with brave rebels (of course!), evil emperors (are there any other kind?), remarkable physics whereby characters can travel and communicate with zero time-lag across the vasty depths of interstellar space (shades of Dr. Who) and, most strangely, no aliens or alien food of any kind (huh?).

These people terraform planets across the ’verse yet apparently can’t eat anything local. I would think that somewhere in the vastness of space there is a planet that has an indigenous plant even more delicious than chocolate or coffee, but no. The complete and utter lack of aliens right down to cute pets is weird too. Humans make pets of everything. There must have been some kind of cuddly alien critter who make good pets on one of those terraformed planets.

However, there’s always the possibility that I missed where Ms. Mihalik mentioned these things.

Polaris Rising also sets up the idea that the unimaginably vast ‘verse is ruled by three High Houses who are each controlled by one person. One person to rule the vastness of space. I was deeply impressed. I attend my local municipal meetings (you should too and I hope Ms. Mihalik does) and it is hard enough to govern the fractious population of the Township of Derry despite it only being about 27,000 people. We have a bureaucracy in place to assist citizens, interpret the rules, and act as an interface between us and higher levels of government. There must be a huge bureaucracy in place in the Consortium, similar to the Vogons in size and scope.

Nonetheless, other than the military, I must have missed it. There are other lower houses, forming the aristocracy, but they don’t seem to do much to run their own worlds or participate in governing. Members of the aristocracy attend parties and conspire and dress well. They provide marriage material for the High Houses since you can’t marry your sibling. I’ll come back to that topic later.

Despite disliking Ada (but not Vin Diesel, sorry, Loch — yum, yum, yum) and thinking the entire premise of the series had serious issues, I moved onto Aurora Blazing. I like space opera, I sort of write space opera as Odessa Moon, I have plans to do more with space opera, and so it behooves me to know what is current and wildly popular in space opera. Jessie Mihalik’s books are wildly popular.

I liked Bianca, our heroine in Aurora Blazing, better than her sister Ada. She had a real problem, that of being experimented upon by her evil ex-husband. There were plenty of issues I noticed as you can tell by my review of Aurora Blazing but I persevered and so here we are at last, with my library copy of Chaos Reigning.

I thought Ada was annoying but she was far more tolerable than our new heroine, 21-year-old Catarina von Hasenberg. “Cat” to her friends. Thank God for small mercies. It wasn’t “Cate,” a name I dislike even more than the horribly overused to the point of cliché “Kate.”

Cat has a problem that is gradually revealed throughout the text and yes, I would agree that what was done to her was criminal. We get an explanation but I have to wonder what the underlying, unrevealed explanation was. What was the dreadful predicament that terrified the most competent person in history (that would be her father, Albrecht von Hasenberg) into doing such a thing? He has the entire universe to govern so it is possible he has concerns beyond being evil. Since he doesn’t make a conscious appearance, we don’t know. Cat’s mother is also, as per all three novels, scarily competent but we don’t know what she thought of what Albrecht did to their daughter either.

Maybe it was the sudden appearance of aliens, hitherto nonexistent in the ’verse.

A major issue I have with this book is Cat herself. She’s twenty-one which is probably part of it. Since discovering her real problem at thirteen, she’s spent the next eight years training everyone around her to think bubbly, bubble-brained socialite heiress whenever they think of her. Think Paris Hilton when she was twenty-one. Clothes, hair, parties, fun, interior décor, celebrities, gossip, shopping, travel; whatever is trendy and amusing. Cat makes a point of demonstrating repeatedly there is nothing more taxing on her mind than selecting the most fashionable shade of nail polish.

At the same time, Cat whines constantly that no one takes her seriously. That she is dismissed as a vacuous but extremely well-connected nonentity. That she’s really G.I. Jane, not Malibu Barbie, and why can’t everyone magically see this when it’s convenient for her?

Because you trained them not to, Cat, dear, including your own dear siblings. Pay attention. You claim you have a brain so use it.

She’s twenty-one so one can hope that Cat will grow a brain to go along with her remarkable physical abilities. But, since she was brought up from birth as an entitled princess of the von Hasenbergs, maybe not.

She meets her true love as would be expected and my goodness was it blah. Alex, our hero, is another studly super-soldier because normal men don’t make the grade here. Not even normal men who are aristocrats. Nope. Sorry guys, you will never measure up despite how hard you work or how talented you are or how funny you can be.

Yet Alex was, was, was, how to put this. Not that interesting. Physically, he was delightful. Again, this might have been me and I missed the details of his sparkling personality because Cat was so whiny and annoying that I was skimming the text at a pretty high rate of speed.

Lest you think this book was a complete waste of Ms. Mihalik’s time and the carcasses of entire forests of trees, there were pluses. You get to meet some members of the other lower aristocracy. You meet Lady Ying Yamato, a very important person. You learn more about the evil Mafia-like criminal organization, the Syndicate. You get battle scenes, deeds of derring-do, political machinations, reversals of fortune, the reveal of an underlying even more dastardly crime (but not, alas, involving hitherto unsuspected aliens), and unexpected allies appearing when least expected.

Sadly, none of this made the book catch fire for me.

But you may be different! Your mileage may vary! As per the Amazon and Goodreads reviews, thousands of people adore Ms. Mihalik’s writing enough to write glowing reviews. You can generally assume that for each review you see (positive or negative) that dozens of people felt the same way but didn’t bother to write a review. Industry and politicians work on this same assumption: every hand-generated letter means one hundred other people felt the same way but didn’t take the time to write.

Here’s another point that bugged me.

I mentioned earlier about the lower Houses providing marriage partners to the High Houses? And not marrying your sibling? One of the really weird things about this series is that the three High Houses (there used to be a fourth) have been in power for generations. Yet these three High Houses have no relatives. At all. There’s mom or dad (who is the sole ruler of the House; it’s primogeniture so it’s the oldest who inherits, whatever their gender) and the kids. That’s it.

That is not just weird. It is bizarre, even more bizarre than the complete lack of aliens of any kind in the entire universe.

If you look at the royal family of Great Britain, HRH Elizabeth II is queen. She’s got a consort (Prince Philip). She bore four children (Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward) who all married and had kids of their own. Those kids are married with kids (William and Harry are at the top of the list). That’s a lot of people.

But wait! There are more relatives! Elizabeth has a sister, Princess Margaret. Margaret had children who had children. Elizabeth and Margaret have cousins who married and had children and grandchildren. Elizabeth and Margaret are direct descendants of Queen Victoria who had nine children, forty-two grandchildren, and eighty-seven great-grandchildren. When you construct the family tree from Queen Victoria out to William and Harry’s generation, you are talking hundreds if not thousands of relatives of Queen Victoria walking around today. Every single one of those relatives has a place in the line of succession unless they specifically asked to be dropped out of the running.

Since absolutely zero collateral relatives are referenced in the text for High Houses (only mom and dad and kids), I have to assume that Ms. Mihalik turns collateral relatives into lower Houses OR that the High Houses execute their collateral relatives to preserve the peace and keep infighting between claimants to the throne to a minimum. Or, they encourage marriage between cousins since this keeps the power and the money inside the family. This is a very traditional way of doing things in aristocracies the world around and I don’t believe future aristocracies will be any different.

I could be wrong. Perhaps Ms. Mihalik had enough to do and so didn’t want to complicate her plot further. Even so, a mention of collateral relatives for Catarina and her siblings would have been nice and added a touch of realism. None of us, unless we are the orphaned children of orphans, operate in a vacuum.

The ending is happy, as one would expect. It also most definitely sets up a series of sequels. Our main villain, who’s been operating behind the scenes since Polaris Rising escapes. He must be dealt with.

There’s also the fact that Ms. Mihalik gave a happy ever after to only three of the von Hasenberg siblings. Ferdinand’s happy ending with Evelyn Rockhurst is implied. The issue here is that both Ferdinand and Evelyn end up the leaders of their respective High Houses. This is traditionally solved by merging the kingdoms. That probably won’t happen so Ms. Mihalik will have to come up with a solution.

The other two siblings are Benedict and Hannah. Do they merit a happy ending? Hannah had a terrible arranged marriage so she could get the “second chance at love” ending. Benedict was almost entirely a walk-on during the series so I have no idea what’s in store for him. There are female super-soldiers so he might meet a nice girl who can out bench-press him, outshoot him, and outfight him. Every red-blooded male wants a girl like that; someone who doesn’t need him at all and grinds him into paste to prove it.

Another issue I have with the ending is that our heroes are all adamant that they will “make things better for everyone in the ’verse.” They will “set things right.” Not ‘we will leave people alone to find their own destiny’. Since we saw very little of Albrecht von Hasenberg and the other two leaders of the High Houses of Rockhurst and Yamato, we have very little idea of what their ideals were like when they came to power.

It may have been much the same. None of these kids, despite the best education in the ’verse, seem to have heard of Lord Acton’s famous statement: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

After all, while emperors may not start out evil, they all seem to end up that way. The emperor’s evil ways encourage the brave rebels to overthrow him. Or her.

Perhaps I am being cynical. Or perhaps Ms. Mihalik is setting up a future series when the brave rebel children of our current crop of heroes realize that dear old mom and dad just don’t understand the needs of the people today and need to be overthrown.

So here we are.

I’m ambivalent but you may not be. You, dear reader, must decide for yourself because while I’ll give you my opinion, I don’t just recognize you may disagree with it. I permit you to disagree, something that the Von Hasenbergs, parents and siblings, might not do since they have your best interests at heart and everything they do is for your own good.

Visit Jessie Mihalik’s website.

If, after all this, you still want to read Polaris Rising, buy it at Amazon.

If you want to continue on and read Aurora Blazing (the one I liked the best): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MP75872/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2

Or get the books at your local library. You paid for them with your tax dollars so take full advantage of their shelves crammed with hundreds of thousands of deserving books.