Showing posts with label mass market paperback. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mass market paperback. Show all posts

1634: The Bavarian Crisis (Ring of Fire) Review

1634: The Bavarian Crisis (Ring of Fire)
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1634: The Bavarian Crisis (Ring of Fire) ReviewBavarian Crisis is another novel about diplomacy in "1634", actually avoiding discussion of local military conflict. The main action of that year is covered in "The Baltic War," which could be read first (and, thankfully, has now been belatedly published). If newcomers start here (or with any of the "1634" books), they will miss too much of deeper import, and may find the story both incomprehensible and boring. This new volume takes us back to 1634, to one of the four crucial side-theaters for which longtime readers of this series have been waiting. The story develops in Thuringia, Bavaria, and Vienna, month by month, with chapter headings in Latin for no discernible reason. (You can play a little game, to find the phrase translated somewhere in the text.) Duke Maximilian of Bavaria is a study in religious madness as he loses control of his realm and makes others the scapegoats. He, and other potentates on the edges of the young United States of Europe, are under constant pressure and intrigue from its agents.
The book opens with three maps, showing places and contemporary political borders one won't find on a modern map. DeMare provides four genealogies so we can follow the intricate relations among characters and the ruling Hapsburg dynasty (the longest and therefore most complicated in all known history). There's much humor in these big books--not in dialogue so much as characters' thoughts, wordplay, anachronistic up-time jargon, manly jokes; nothing elaborate. Most everyone is very reasonable, that is, they make their reasons perfectly clear. In general, everybody acts so reasonably, with such little emotion, such wry humor, that the result is flat. One manifest flub--having a lead undercover character blurt out her identity when nobody had asked--is actually a setup for the final suspense. The pace has to be slowed by long digressions on historical and strategical matters (vital to alternative HISTORY, after all), while immediate tactics are concealed in the commanders' heads and cleverly sprung on the enemy (and the reader). That's about the only suspense, as the Adolf/Stearns USE juggernaut rolls on from success to success.
This West-Virginians-in-the-Thirty-Years-War saga is a thoroughly collaborative work in progress, with significant online input. Thus, the fact this book is "late" to the fray means little, because there is no single main line, many themes in parallel, and no single series "hero" (instead, many). That is what makes this alternative history series unique, yet frustrating to try to follow while it is being published. These later novels lack the shock and surprise of the first, truly novel. They also lack the sense of desperation that made "1632" and "1633" so powerful.1634: The Bavarian Crisis (Ring of Fire) Overview

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1636: The Saxon Uprising (The Ring of Fire) Review

1636: The Saxon Uprising (The Ring of Fire)
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1636: The Saxon Uprising (The Ring of Fire) ReviewI read this as an ebook and not as the hardcover.
For the last few books, the Assiti Shards series had been all over the place. It felt like too much was happening in too short a time - a few decades worth of war happened in 4 short years with internal social convulsions thrown in between. I was thinking about giving up on the series.
Then, the last book, The Eastern Front, threw in a seriously unexpected curveball.
From that plot twist, this book started up with a mess that turned into an unexpectedly fun novel. This one felt like a return to the first few books in the series. There are multiple story lines occurring at the same time with many of the usual suspects but without that many new characters added in. It resolved itself nicely while leaving open a handful of story lines to continue in the next books of the series.1636: The Saxon Uprising (The Ring of Fire) Overview

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