Fiction
In reply to the discussion: What are you reading the week of August 10, 2014? [View all]SheilaT
(23,156 posts)by Matthew Flaming.
It was recommended to me by a friend whose normally reliable for these things.
It's sort of a time travel/alternate history book, but written by someone who has never read those genres. Oh, and when I looked at Good Reads and Amazon reviews, it was clear to me that the people who praised it and said it was highly original have likewise never read time travel or alternate history.
In fact, while time travel does seem to occur two times in the course of the novel, and the existence of a Kingdom of Ohio points to alternate history, Flaming gets basic historical information wrong. Wrong. Wrong. He has Louis XIV still King of France at the time of the French Revolution. He died in 1715. He talks about the Prince of Wales paying a visit to America in 1837. That was the year Victoria became Queen of England, and there hadn't been a Prince of Wales at that point since 1820. It's sort of like the author remembered a few tidbits of history but couldn't be bothered to check out anything. Nor did the editors at the publishing house. I find those sorts of lapses to be totally uncalled for.
Anyway, all of the characters are cardboard and the plot simply isn't a very good one. Don't bother to read it.
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