: 1) Um... FLOOD!? Where the eff is GRAVEMIND! ANYONE who's played the game
: knows that He is STILL ON THE ARK! and the FLOOD is ON THE ARK! Perhaps we
: assume the Halo killed him... POSSIBLE... except it would have killed
: EVERYTHING on the Ark, and the Halo doesn't effect Flood right? It just
: KILLS their FOOD and starves them... (Right?!)

This really stuck out to me as a problem. Did Tragic Solitude re-seed the animals after the replacement Halo fired? If so this was never clarified. We're told that the damage from the Halo breached the containment walls, but that would imply they survived the pulse... which would mean the Flood would have to be there as well. Odd.

: 2) Yeah... Didn't Half Jaw's fleet GLASS "half a continent" In
: Africa... Where the portal is... and people in this novel skadoodled
: around... and fought under trees and provided dirt to the retrievers... I
: understand glassing (technically since the future scene in Reach) has been
: less dramatic in present years, but COME ON!

I always took Hood's "half a continent" to be hyperbole. Still, one would expect there to be more damage in the portal's immediate surroundings.

: 3) The portal takes weeks/months to get to The Ark. Gosh, I sure forgot the
: part in Halo 3 where everyone went into cryo to wait out the trip :-| Good
: thing we aren't dealing with an extinct race with TIME TRAVEL CRYSTALS!
: (Whew, would SUCK if the Didact knew about them sons of guns!) Let us not
: contemplate portal technology from other novels instantaneously moving
: Storm Covenant and the digitizing thing from Spec Op... er... Spartan
: Ops...

We've known that for a few years actually. The few weeks' travel time originally came from one of Halo Waypoint's fiction videos IIRC. I don't have that big of a problem with it: it's a long distance and it takes time even for the Forerunners.

: 6) Warped Human consciousness that manifests as hard light skulls in giant
: suits of armor instead
: of actual AI?! Since we've established Forerunner ARE NOT Human and are TWICE
: as tall... Let's one up that with HUMAN SIZED ROBOTS that LOOK HUMAN!
: Because during a flood outbreak, there was NO need to bring these out on
: the Ark, or be mentioned by 343 Guilty incompetent... Right?

Yeah the Armigers felt very forced, like they had to shoehorn them into the story because they're in the next game.

: 8) Why is there an Ark Monitor?! The installation was explored by Human,
: Covenant, Elites, 343, Flood, what have ya... Oh there was a Monitor
: SLEEPING the whole time without explanation...

I agree it was weird the monitor never made itself known during Halo 3.

: 10) Cortana can TOTALLY interface with Forerunner tech and fits on a chip...
: but a Monitor has STACKS and STACKS of rooms of servers to operate? Then
: how the devil can 343 bounce around the galaxy all well and good? OH, they
: were the Ark systems? That The Huragok had control of... No wonder The
: Monitor stopped his assault on Earth to protect them?!?!?!

The idea that a Huragok could take control of the whole Ark was absolutely ridiculous. They're basically janitors and shouldn't be able to outwit even the simplest of Forerunner security AIs that Solitude would probably have as his backup subprocesses.

: 11) Spartan Whiniak! Seriously... Kodiak was SO whiny!... Where was the stoic
: death machine that Spartans are? I understand the dude-bro Spartans not
: being quite as awesome as the Originals, but... seriously... he was like a
: high school football pwayer dat wost a game to a wival school. (Unamused)

Not just that, the Spartan-IV characters were just really boring. Like the writer just took the frat boy S-IV stereotype and cloned it.

: 13) Cyborg person thing... So... is this a thing now? Technoflood? Halo lore
: technology definitely permits this... but... really? We're going there? I
: mean... it opens it up for a horror sub-genre... but WHY would a Monitor
: use HIM to have death battle?... and if he ONLY needs a human hand... then
: create snakelike things and make two per person.... and use their feet and
: other skin to create other "hands"...

The cyborg and the Vale fight were definitely a big "WTF" moment. The whole thing felt very shoehorned. Don't monitors have eye lasers or Sentinels for this kind of thing?

Lamb's death felt very random and pointless too. Like this Sentinel just comes out of nowhere with no buildup at all and kills him.

: 19) What was up with constantly calling the Halo Array... Just Halo?

To be fair, only Forerunner constructs really prefer calling it "Halo Array".

: 20) No offense... but the novel felt like a 350 page... fanfic... and I've
: read some amazing fanfic on this site... That... it was not.

It was very fanfic-y in parts. I liked some of the human-Sangheili interaction and the character stuff but the rest of the book was very flawed.