The Center Cannot Hold

Starred review from July 7, 2003
The latest volume in Turtledove's colossal and brilliant saga of an alternate (and disunited) United States may be the strongest and most compelling since the opener, How Few Remain
(1997). Juxtaposing historical dilemmas and universal human ones, the novel explores weird twists of history at both levels. Jake Featherston leads an independent Confederacy toward war, with his propaganda chief a scrawny undersized Jew. Anne Colleton attends the Richmond Olympics of 1936, still dynamic but worried about losing her sex appeal. George Enos has lost his mother, accidentally shot by her drunken lover Ernie, and is now following in his late father's footsteps as a commercial fisherman out of Boston. Cincinnatus Driver and Scipio are on a collision course with the Holocaust that the Confederacy is preparing for African-Americans in Alabama, but Cincinnatus has also borne the burden of making peace with the parents of his Chinese daughter-in-law. Jonathan Moss is climbing back into the cockpit of an alternate P-40, ready to wield it like a sword of vengeance against Canadian terrorists who killed his wife and daughter. And one does wonder what will come of a WWII with France and Britain under quasi-Fascist regimes. Readers will not have long to wait, as the WWII trilogy is only a couple of years from seeing the light of print—which many fans will find far too long. Agent, Russell Galen.(Aug. 1)Forecast:Look for Turtledove to make further inroads among mainstream readers. NAL recently bought the author's massive epic on what might have happened had the Japanese occupied Hawaii during WWII,
Days of Infamy, for mid-six figures.

July 15, 2002
As Jake Featherston campaigns his way across the Confederate States of America (CSA) in the name of his militant Freedom Party, other forces in the world are preparing to move against the CSA's northern neighbor, the hated United States. Set in a North American continent divided into two American nations and an occupied Canada, the sequel to American Empire: Blood & Iron continues an American history that might have happened. Turtledove never tires of exploring the paths not taken, bringing to his storytelling a prodigious knowledge of his subject and a profound understanding of human sensibilities and motivations. For most libraries. [For more alternative history, see Worlds That Weren't, a collection of novellas by Turtledove and others, reviewed on p. 127. - Ed.]

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2002
In the first chapter of the sixth volume of the alternate history Turtledove began in "How Few Remain "(1997), Mary McGregor, daughter of Canadian resistance fighter (or anti-American terrorist) Arthur McGregor, seems like a would-be Palestinian suicide bomber. That resemblance immediately establishes that the book's world is not ours, and that Turtledove, still the complete master of his creation, is going to give us a book even scarier than its predecessors. In so doing, he advances all the subplots and all the characters still alive and kicking, although the major themes here are the decline of American military superiority, the further advance toward power of Jake Featherston's gray-shirted Freedom Party in the Confederacy, and the onset of a global depression. Turtledove exercises both his historiography and his wit, on the grand scale as the French restore their monarchy, and on the small scale as Quebecer Lucien Galtier loses his wife to cancer and Sylvia Enos' son George, grown up and gone to sea, readies for marriage. He also shows Sylvia unable to take her ghostwriter, Ernie, as a lover because of his war wound (the culturally literate only need one chance to correctly guess Ernie's last name). Another harrowing and literate installment in Turtledove's standard-setting alternate history. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)