Review: Wonderfully accurate from a historical standpoint but a bit short of high drama
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 25, 2014
As usual I received this book for free in exchange for an honest review.  This time it was directly from the author.  Despite that kindness I give my candid opinions below.On the positive side, I usually judge historical fiction pretty harshly and this one came out unscathed on any factual point.  It's a delicate balance to build a work of fiction in the milieu of a well-documented historical period but this book performs that function wonderfully.  It's helpful, I suspect, that the author is well studied in this time period and it's clear in his craftsmanship of this book that he really knows what he's talking about.  His action is believable and appropriate given the setting as well as engaging to the reader.To the negative, despite being a very short text, it did seem to take a while to get anywhere.  There's lots of detailed background but the primary action of the book is practically an eye-blink by comparison.  Unlike other readers, this didn't keep me up until 5am but instead lulled me to sleep about half-way through.  When I picked it up again the meat of the narrative started not long after but it was over in a flash that made me wonder what all the build-up was about.  Lastly, and as is almost always the case, the text does have its share of grammatical and other errors but relative to the average book of this sort it's wonderfully free of problems.In summary, I really like what the author's done here but I wonder how this will stand on its own as a book.  I realize that it's the first part of a multi-part series but this section seems to lack any "hook" that makes it really draw the reader forward into further volumes.  I liked it and I'm glad I read it but I'm not left with any insatiable curiosity about what happens next.  There are threads left dangling but maybe just not the right threads to make me pester the author for a free copy of parts two through infinity.