Better?
Depends on your expectations.
The Honorverse cycle is effectively three successive series: 1-5 are a sequence of more or less independent relatively narrow-focus stories, set against the backdrop of a bigger war, 6-8 is a single narrative, and 9-plus a whole cycle unto itself encompassing the entire escalated war.
War of Honor is the key pivot point because at that point the simple and straightforward, Harrington "Biography" becomes a multi-faceted saga with three distinct narratives that run in parallel (And are mostly self-contained: you *can* read any of the narratives without reading the rest of the saga. That is one reason for the info dumps and the duplicated scenes some people complain about when reading the full saga.)
The three Narratives (Crown of Slaves, Saganami Island, and Honor's War proper) combine to tell a single story but it requires a lot of patience because of the logistics; right now, each of the threads are incomplete though they *have* converged in the latest volume.
So if you accept that, big as it is, WAR OF HONOR is just the launchpad for another *nine* volumes (four of which are a single HH super-novel), then 130 pages of setup is trivial.
To explain what Weber is up to gives away too much, so I'll spoiler the Wikipedia brief:
Spoiler:
The political makeup and history of the series frequently echoes actual history, particularly that of Europe in the last half of the second millennium. The series is consciously modeled on the Horatio Hornblower series by C.S. Forester, and its main character on Admiral Lord Nelson (like Horatio Hornblower). Weber originally planned Harrington to die, like Nelson, at the peak of her career in the climactic Battle of Manticore in 1920 PD (4020 AD), and intended to continue the series with her children as the main protagonists.[4]
However collaborating author Eric Flint intervened asking for the invention of a mutual enemy for both the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the Republic of Haven to oppose in a spy and counterspy spin-off sub-series the two contractually agreed to co-write, just as they have contracts to write in Flint's 1632 universe.
This "rethink" and redesign caused Weber to move the series' internal chronology up by about 20 years and begat the Crown of Slaves novel, first in the "Crown of Slaves" sub-series based on a number of the short stories of the first four collections.
In this scenario, proxies for Manticore and Haven oppose the same hidden enemy, the genetic slavers and powers behind the government and corporations of the planet of Mesa. Mesa is later revealed in Mission of Honor to be part of a secret cabal of about a dozen highly capable planets which are busily building a secret navy using advanced technologies at a secret planet and known to itself as the Mesan Alignment. The Mesan Alignment's navy has new technology and sneak attacks Manticore in 1920 PD during the twelfth mainline novel, Mission of Honor.
The Mesans have a 600-year-old[4] secret program to reinstitute purposeful genetic engineering of humans and break up the Solarian League, while taking down all opponents opposing such genetic engineering. This makes the staunchly anti-genetic-slavery star nations of Haven, Manticore, and various associates of the planet Beowulf primary targets of the Mesan Alignment. The four sub-series books and last two mainline Honorverse novels detail the rising extent of this threat.
As the two sub-series progress, albeit with somewhat-separate casts of characters, each is expected by Weber to carry the detailed storyline events particular to their astrographical region forward and tie together into an ongoing plotline concerning the massive and monolithic Solarian League, which foreshadowing in the most recent novels suggests is about to undergo severe disruption.[4]
The thirteenth mainline novel, A Rising Thunder, ties together events in both sub-series and synchronizes the timeline of each sub-series with Honor Harrington's mainline novels. This book confirms the Solarian League is officially now the new Mesan cat's paw, effectively at war with the Star Empire, as it has been manipulated into error after error by the operatives of the Mesan Alignment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse
Me, I like what he is up to:
If he pulls it off, he will have assembled the biggest space opera saga this side of Lensmen.
But that is key: he is doing a full-blown, galactic scale Space Opera.
Ahead lie entire chapters (and more than one per book) of infodumps and getting into the heads of the antagonists, of building up massive casts of significant players, of (apparent) loose threads that drift from book to book and series to series.
Weber is putting a frakking *lot* of work into the saga and to fully appreciate it you will have to, too.
That means:
- Reading the anthologies. There are very good stories in them. There are also some... curious... building blocks.
- Reading the Saganami Island books (no big sacrifice, they are very much in line with the early books of the Series and great reads by themselves. And the "Nasty Kitty" is going to go down as one of the more memorable starships and crews in SF history).
- Reading the Crown of Slaves stories (entirely different tone and format than the Mantie volumes and the payoff is yet to come, apparently). Good reads with a lighter tone than the other two threads.
- Patience, patience, patience... Cliffhangers abound. Worse, the most recent volume doesn't even do a cliffhanger; it just... ends... presumably to pick up in next March's direct followup.
One thing I can say: there are a lot of fun moments along the way as payoff for the time investment. Good plot twists, heart-wrenching moments for favorite characters, and a chance for most supporting characters to shine as the spotlight is not always on Honor. There is a lot of politics, a bit of humor, and more than a fair amount of action but the infodumps do *not* go away.
Still, if you're starting WAR OF HONOR now, you won't have a long wait til SHADOW OF FREEDOM. If you're willing to make the investment, there is a lot of good SF ahead of you.