Review: How do you like your history? Altered and with a Time Machine
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 9, 2013
I'm giving this book one of my very rare 5 stars. It's the most imaginative time travel/alt history novels I've read.Often an alt history has a point in time that changes world events as we know them. This book does this several times because how things turned out in the first shot were not only way different than what we know (latest date is 1885), but the intrepid time travelers keep tweaking to see if they can fix what they know has gone terribly wrong.Starting with the Battle of Waterloo, I was grabbed and held by the story. Hey, straightforward history until...well, not what you'd expect.Lots of reviewers have given better summaries than I have, and I'll defer to them for the details. Be careful, though. Some of that summarizing will no doubt contain spoilers. Which I have not by the simple expedient of keeping quiet about anything you could read in the book's description.What really brings this book to a higher level for me is the use of the appropriate language of the times through which the time travelers move. Often the time travel comes into modern times, and the writer can relax with today's verbal quirks. Heather Albano nails it during all the time periods.Since there's a second book in the series available, I'm eager to see if she keeps up the quality and, I suspect, into other time periods than those in the first book.Super good read.