FREEDOM AND JUSTICE — AMERICAN STYLE 1632 And in northern Germany things couldn’t get much worse. Famine. Disease. Religous war laying waste the cities. Only the aristocrats remained relatively unscathed; for the peasants, death was a mercy. 2000 Things are going OK in Grantville, West Virginia, and everybody attending the wedding of Mike Stearn’s sister (including the entire local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America, which Mike leads) is having a good time. THEN, EVERYTHING CHANGED…. When the dust settles, Mike leads a group of armed miners to find out what happened and finds the road into town is cut, as with a sword. On the other side, a scene out of Hell: a man nailed to a farmhouse door, his wife and daughter attacked by men in steel vests. Faced with this, Mike and his friends don’t have to ask who to shoot. At that moment Freedom and Justice, American style, are introduced to the middle of the Thirty Years’ War.
Published January 1st 2000
597 pages
Must Read – 4.5 stars
Read from 29th March to 5th April
So first off I really, really enjoyed this and can’t believe how under hyped and underrepresented this is in the book blog community.
This is such an interesting historical fiction novel with a twist. It is such a unique idea and concept, this may because I’ve never read an alternative history novel but it is just so out there that I think finding something similar would be hard.
Going into this I didn’t know if I would like the writing style due to the historic nature and discussion of the novel but it is really approachable and light. It discusses a lot of difficult topic and is so thought provoking especially as someone with a religious disposition. It really discussed the topic without using a critical standing. All the actions taken by the characters were based on humanity and the rights of people and their lives rather than their views, beliefs, or opinions.
It was really interesting to see how the author broached the cultural differences and at some times it was all too convenient. A lot of the criticisms state that it wasn’t accurate enough or that things were just placed but in all honesty the book is about the discussion and the ‘what if’ question. I think people should take it as such because that’s the way to gain the most out of the book.
The main things I struggled with were the characters. There are a lot of people and because they’re such generic name I really struggled to understand who was who and who was being talked about. I sort of grasped the main roles but along with a 10 people committee there were so many other people having roles. I really enjoyed Jeff and Julie. They were such strong characters within this story and I really enjoyed when they got involved.
I find it really funny how people talk about instalove in YA because, people, this is the biggest and most frequent case of instalove I’ve ever found in a book. I did enjoy the relationships especially when they complement each other but it just happened and that was that. I don’t know if it was more a matter of the time period and that was just generally accepted or if the author doesn’t have a strong relationship writing style. I will state that I did really enjoy reading about relationships from a male author’s perspective because the male thoughts just seem a lot more genuine than that of YA.
So returning to the writing. The time passed by really fast and the jumps in time were either explicitly written or broken up with another scene and characters. I really liked reading about Gustav but the few other characters and scene was just to tell the reader what plans were in the works that the settlement never knew about. There is a relatively good mix of dialogue to description but at some times there were just paragraphs of explanation and discussion of goings on. IT was like being in too many people’s heads and just became overwhelming because of how long it went on.
I have a terrible lack of history knowledge and I’m trying to gain insight into different time periods. I know that there are some criticisms out there about the history not being accurate enough but it is heavily based off of real events and people and even if I just get the general idea then that is good enough for me.
That’s all folks!
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