Review: Interesting Premise -- Good Outcome
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 24, 2013
I've never been one to read much alternate history, but I'm a sucker for WWII and the premise of Mr. Avera's story, Reich, was an interesting one to say the least. It's been 158 years after Hitler has died to preserve the homeland of his new Aryan state and Germany has lived under the rule of a group of military police called Enforcers in the years since. No one gets out due to radiation from the outside after Germany destroyed the world to secure victory in the war.But...things are not as they seem in Avera's version of Germany. In the first few chapters, the author does a fantastic job of throwing the reader off course, changing narrators a few times, giving the story a layered, complete viewpoint through it all. If I have any complaints about that, it would only be that the same event is sometimes described nearly the exact same way in each of the perspectives, but the shared nation for the narrators may have given them all a shared vision of the events.I liked where the story went, once the truth was revealed, but I also thought the author could have teased the reader some more, holding the carrot for a while longer before unveiling the mystery to the book.All in all, a great, fun read and a good start for a new author. I'll look forward to more from Avera in the future.