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American Front | Rating | |
| A | |||
| Harry Turtledove | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Great War | How Few Remain, American Front, Walk in Hell, Breakthroughs, Blood and Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, The Victorious Opposition | ||
In 1862, the Confederacy successfully broke from the United States. In 1881 they again beat the north in battle, with a bit of help from Britain and France. Now it's 1914, and the yankees have allies of their own in the Germans and their Kaiser. And when an Archduke is assassinated in Sarajevo, it sets off a Great War comperable to the one fought in truth. But this war will extend beyond the boundaries of Europe, to the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific, to South American coasts, and, of course, to the North American continent. Once more the United States is pitting itself against the Confederacy and Canada simultaneously. But this time, the US is prepared!
As did How Few Remain, the story here relies far more on how characters manage to cope with the war than it does on strategy or tactics. Of course, strategy and tactics, and the results thereof, affect how people will cope. However, there are a lot more stories to tell, this time around. Although we follow each viewpoint character for only four to seven pages each scene, it was still a hundred pages before they began to be revisited!
It was not, thankfully, a hundred pages before things got going, though. It took that long in the last book for the first shots to be fired; here, it is barely a third that. And despite the slow pace of any one character's story, thanks to the many plot threads that must be followed, Turtledove makes the pace of the war itself quick. A few paragraphs, often a mere side comment in a sentence, tells us that weeks have passed since the last scene, and what (if anything) of import has happened since then.
One particularly nice touch is the slight twists the text gives to real colloquialisms and events. When the US attempts to take Pearl Harbor and the rest of the Sandwich Islands, it is referred to by one sailor as "a day of infamy for the British." Two soldiers afree that the bombs airplanes drop will never be large enough, thanks to their weight, to be worth the effort. This sort of thing made me chuckle, and I'd bet most readers will as well.
I do have one complaint, though: the author was a bit heavy on names starting with M. There's a Morrell, Morse, Moss, Martin, and Matarakas, and they all fight for the US. It can get very confusing, remembering who is on which war front and what happened last to him. It's a nit, true, but I sure do wish Turtledove had picked a few different names to use.
But I thoroughly enjoyed this book, despite the confusion. It's an excellent portrayal of the alternate history as well as the morality and technology of the early twentieth century. And some of the plot threads are truly engaging, such as the that of the New York City Socialist activist, or the black butler in the Carolinas. I thouroughly recommend this to any enthusiast of alternate history stories.
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