books. That's just not the kind of environment that produces rigorously planned multi-tale interaction, not in my experience.
Which makes this all the more remarkable. The stories mesh together very well. And the building of events and braiding them together was excellent. An up-time farmer wants to own the land he farms. A sheep rancher wants her fine breeds to remain unsullied by coarser down-time wool. A ballet teacher wants to see a live performance of The Nutcracker. Somehow these things blend together and echo off some unrest in nearby Frankonia to forment a revolution.
The book is divided into four parts. The first two itroduce these disparate elements, the third the underlying problem, and the last and longest has everything come together. In some respects, though, it can be divided into only two parts. The first two combined are the shorter, more spontaneous stories taken from Baen's Bar, along with an occasional very small story - an interlude, really - by Flint about official response to things. The other part, the latter sections, is more organized, better planned. I'm not sure the chapters in the third part even came from the forums. And the fourth section definitely did not. These took what others wrote and incorporated it into a larger tale. It's much more focused.
Which is, surprisingly, a problem. The book suddenly becomes extremely political, steeped in the whos and whats of 1634 Germany. The first two sections might introduce necessaty elements, but the characters are dropped by the wayside, which doesn't help. There were suddenly dozens of new names with no gradual introduction, and a good number of down-time characters and places to remember as well. The text grows thick with exposition of how guids or castles or land ownership works in the then and there. Politics, with explanations of not only how the nobles and people work things but also their current stances on matters of the day, take an especially large amount of space.
As a result, the book gets mired down in detail. It was just too much information. I don't need to know everything about 1634 Germany, I just wanted something to continue the story of the Ring of Fire. Heck, lost in all that detail, at least for me, is what this rebellion was about. Freedom of religion? Maybe, but I got the impression that that idea was foisted on the region by Grantville and wasn't really very popular. Land ownership? Maybe, but it didn't really seem to be a prime concern of the down-timers. Guild membership? Well, it comes up, but isn't really a large part of anything. And I'm finding it hard to think of any other issues it could have been over.
Even the rebellion is pretty low-key. This isn't the American Revolution, with armies and uprisings. This is more akin to a propaganda campaign with a riot here and there. There's no military fiction, here. No, it's all political maneuvering.
I'm beginning to grow tired of all the side stories this series is generating. I appreciate how dropping a modern town, even one of only three thousand residents, into the Thirty Year's War will create a lot of possibilities that will interact to make some drastic changes on all scales, but do we really have to see everything? Short little stories that tell how an individual managed to make good thanks to the unusual circumstances and opportunities, as told in Ring of Fire, are fine. Stories detailing the larger-scale progression and evolution of the war and politics in Europe are great. But small-scale politics? Include them as a subplot, or just mention the results. Devoting an entire book to this was overkill.
While the book starts out enjoyable, when it gets to the meat of it all I just found it tedious and a bit confusing. This volume can pretty easily be skipped. At the very least I recommend you save your money and buy it in paperback.
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