On Basilisk Station by David Weber
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Very good book, though it takes a while for the supporting characters to be fleshed out and develop personalities. But the main character, Honor Harrington, is well-developed from the beginning, and you can feel her excitement in the first chapter at receiving her new command.
The Honor Harrington books, of which this is the first, have been compared to the Horatio Hornblower and Master and Commander books. The difference, of course, is that the Honor books are set in deep space about two thousand years from now. 