I finished the Harry Turtledove book I've been reading tonight. Not surprisingly, I give it a solid +. I was predisposed to like it after reading HOW FEW REMAIN, the alternative history Civil War novel that sets the stage for this one. This is the first of a projected four-book series following that world into the World War I era. Like many series books, it ends as a cliffhanger, but I don't mind that since I knew it was coming.
Turtledove combines two basic ingredients here. The first is a sort of minimalist historiography of change: he posits a single small change in history, and then tries to follow the consequences through. A dispatch lost and found during the Civil War is the only event that separates the Great War universe from our own; all else follows from that. So it is that Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt are still powerful politicians (though on opposite sides of the USA/CSA split), poison gas is invented at about the same time, and so on.
The other basic ingredient is to tell the story as a series of vignettes, each revolving around ordinary people. Though the politicians and generals appear (including a rather overdrawn General Custer), it's the soldiers and sailors and farmers and housewives who Turtledove follows. Each chapter advances the story of half a dozen of these characters just a bit further. You know when a major battle has taken place offstage, but you know it through the impact is has on the just plain folks in the book. I like this style of storytelling, though it does tend to drag a bit at times. It's nice to be able to get to know the characters rather than deal with endless armies of spear-carriers.
Minuses? A few. There are a couple of sex scenes that don't do much to advance the story and appear to have been thrown in solely on the notion that a novel needs sex scenes. There are big groups of people who don't get one of the sympathetic characters drawn from their ranks (the Mormons, for example) and so remain anonymous faces. But overall, I quite like this book, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.