Settling Accounts: Return Engagement - Harry Turtledove

While doing my post-book diligence on this free-to-kindle novel, I discovered this is actually a gigantic (10 or more?) book series, which explains a lot. Why are fantasy series always so long? Perhaps because they don't have any merit as individual novels and so need to build a fanbase on character loyalty.

Synopsis: This is an alternate history, based on the premise that the Confederates won the Civil War and the downstream changes of this major history-changing notion. It's set in WWII, and does a decent job of highlighting the delicate balance that has lead to our current history and how even small decisions could dramatically affect the timeline. I though the alternate history presented was interesting (the lack of Russian revolution leads to acceptance of socialism in the US - certainly the 40s was a breeding ground for that kind of thought), although discussion of the underlying currents was lacking.

I guess my overall impression of this novel is that it took on too much - there were too many characters (hard to identify with them, even though the perspective gained was good) and too much war (the US-France/Confederate-Nazi parallels seemed sloppy). Plus, the language was simplistic and repetitive (everytime a character was re-introduced, we got the same background). Due to the number of characters, there wasn't a lot of character depth. Also, I think the confederate genocide was unbelievable. I'm not a scholar of genocide, but to compare this to Rwanda or Bosnia is beyond a stretch. Of course, it's a direct parallel for Nazi Germany, although I don't feel like Turtledove even came close to capturing the motivation behind such horrific acts.

This book probably provides an interesting perspective, and may make you think a bit, but to get the full effect you'd likely have to read the full series. Based on my reading of this one novel, it certainly doesn't seem worth it.