Title: If this is his "best" I won't be reading any more from him
Product review: I slogged to the end of this book, hoping for some nugget of goodness to redeem it. It never came.The most glaring problem, among many, is the fact that the South African villains are so cartoonishly evil. Other than delivering AK-47s, they serve only as a miraculous way to sway all the pro-slavery political leaders toward abolition. So the thing feels more like a fairly tale than a serious "what if?".Many have commended the opening chapters' battle scenes, but it's not as though the world needed a novel to explore what war would be like if massed infantry charged automatic weapons.There was obviously a lot of painstaking research done on various Civil War units and soldiers, but the silly plot and weak, weak characterizations detract too much.
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