| $@%&! level: High (Not exactly every other word, but still pretty high. Hillbillies and miners; what do you expect?) “Bedroom” level: Medium-High (see below) Violence level: High Back Cover: “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.” |
Once you've got the characters and the situation, the rest of it just follows naturally, and could just as easily be called historical fiction, except that it never happened in our version of history. It's not a bad way of learning about what was going on in European history around this time, though. At the very least you'll never be in any danger of forgetting Gustavus Adolphus.
Now, I do have to warn you that there is one whole chapter (I believe it's chapter 16, but I could be wrong) that is devoted to a wedding night. However, although it does start out as physically descriptive, the more part of it is actually internally and psychologically descriptive. It's written from the point of view of a 1632 German girl who has been systematically abused for several years, and has learned to survive. And she's just married a good and gentlemanly West Virginian teenager. Her thoughts as she experiences the difference are kind of fascinating, actually. Various other “bedroom” incidents take place, but they aren't given descriptions at all. It's just the one with Gretchen and Jeff that you should watch out for.
And yes, the whole thing tends to be bloodthirsty and violent. The Americans are fighting not only for their own survival and way of life, but also to protect the German people around them, and they use whatever means they can find for that purpose. The impressive thing is that they don't entirely panic. That may actually be the one least realistic part of the story, and it's mostly due to one man who manages to think clearly, decide what kind of world he wants to live in, figure out which ways of acting will most likely lead to that kind of world, and—most importantly—convince everyone else to go along with him. It helps that he was already a respected leader in the community, but that's pretty nearly super-human level ability. Frankly, I really wish we could get that kind of clear and honest leadership out of real-world politicians. The Americans don't barricade themselves in their town, they don't decide it's them against the whole world, and they don't try to find someone to blame for what happened. I'd like to think we'd all act that way in a real crisis, but sometimes I'm not so sure.
Basically, if you want some good, old-fashioned action-adventure, with a bit of patriotism, ingenuity, and romance thrown in, this is a good one to try.
(And yes, that's a picture on the cover of the cavalry versus hillbillies in a jeep. It's like that.)
(Also, it's available from Baen Free Library. Even if you don't want to read this book, seriously, check out the Baen Free Library, because it's just cool.)