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Almost ★★☆☆☆

There was a lot i didn’t like about this. The biggest is of course the victim blaming. The perpatrators of the two cases of queer bashing – emfasis on bash – are seen basically as forces of nature. In one case no reporting to the police and no complaining about how ACAB. There should be a law! OK, the police should enforce the law!

Also, how Dawn didn’t leave Gertrude alone. Really, when you find out a well-hidden secret about someone, then don’t hunt that person down and confront them with their past. Letting sleeping dogs lie often is the right choice.

Oh, and i didn’t like that it was written in first person, present tense. Just like, say, [b:We Are Okay|28243032|We Are Okay|Nina LaCour|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1471899036l/28243032.SY75.jpg|48277368], which i DNF.
Honestly, i think you need a good reason for that choice, that is, you should make good use of what that narrative technique gives you, and i don’t see that here. (At the moment i am quite slowly reading »[b:The Bone People|460635|The Bone People|Keri Hulme|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348988500l/460635.SY75.jpg|1294681]«. …)
The writing here is, well, OK. There are parts where i went »oh, yeah, this is a first novel, right«.

Eh. Mostly not bad. But not good, either, IMO.
The story didn’t grip me. Also, it doesn’t make much sense. Why would it be bad to hav Dionysus around? The »but maenads« from the book seems odd. Also, What was the idea behind trying to get Dionysus reincarnate in the first place? Why him, why not, IDK, Plutus? The guy behind it was a capitalist, after all.Yu know, a wannabe plutocrat.

Also, it is purportedly set in 1969. That seems odd to me. Yeah, no. I don’t expect characters in a novel to quote from a newspaper all the time, but i thought two things where on most Usonians’ minds at the time: The Vietnam war and the Apollo program. Both get hardly any mention in the book. The Apollo program gets one, »the moon landing«, singular, without any real thought about it. That, where one scene is set on 24 November 1969, the day Conrad, Gordon and Bean successfully fell back down from the sky.

The reason given why magic users don’t get drafted doesn’t make much sense. »In general, magic wasn’t great for the battlefield.« Yu know what isn’t great for the battlefield? Almost every other job! Being a backer isn’t great for the battlefield! Throwing bread at someone isn’t usually killing them. So, why wouldn’t the US Army just give magic users an M16 and tell them to shoot at the enemy, like everybody else?


In general, what about other religions? If Dionysus is real, what about, say יהוה? And was Oily Josh his son or not?

The joke »“You’d better be careful, […] You’re taking your own name in vain now.”« is believable, but completely misses the point of the commandment. The name yu should not take in vain is given in the text, it’s »יהוה«, it is not about the word »god«. If Dionysus wants a commandment not to use the name »Dionysus« in vain, then he has to command that himself.

Talking of that god: I’m not sure, how much the finale was meant to remind the reader of the Binding of Isaac. In any case, that whole scene made no sense to me at all.


It could hav been edited more strongly. There were some garden path sentences and some idioms that should hav been cleaned up. Some plain errors »[T]hey hauled Sam him onto the grass.«


I didn’t like that you would need a Kindle or Nook account to get an e-book version. There is a print-on-demand version.

The tipografy is general not too bad – most people won’t notice a problem, i think – but i found it grating. Especially the fake slanted text instead of italics. The letter spacing there is atrocious.
No hifenation, which – together with the somewhat large print – means there ar frequently large gaps between the words.

Reads way too much like a book for fundamentalist Real True Christans™:
»Be afraid of the Government. The Child Protection Service, sorry, i mean the Population Police will come and take yu. What may look like child abuse from yur parents is just their way of protecting yu.«
»We ar against abortion, so our enemy, the liberals ar for forced abortion.«

Maybe that wasn’t the intent, but, that’s how it looked to me. Death of the author and all.
Sure, the parents didn’t talk about Jesus much, but, come on, the children were named Matthew, Mark and Luke, missing John just for legal reasons.

I ges i should add:
Authors set the sene; yu hav to look at the whole senario. It is not enuf to say that the parents did the best they could in the fictional, carefully crafted setting, yu hav also look at why the setting was chosen. I think that was a »but what if liberals get their wishes, legally speaking?«, and then the forced abortion bits make no sense whatsoever.
The go-to example for distopian novels is, of course, 1984: there it is clear: what if Stalinism, but forty years more of it? With that in mind: how do yu get to this setting?

I sort-of get that the author didn’t mock the fatuity of the common independent agrarian laborer. (How can yu be a pig farmer and not know the word »offal«. But seriously, didn’t Mr. Garner do some calculation and see that hidroponic farming will not be worth it unless he grows grass in his basement?)
Also, not calling out the sexism of the male Garners was a real minus for the book.
Dictionary attacks already existed when the book was written. Also, where was the chat servers? How was it save from The Government before The Rally? And did the do rubber-hose ciyptanalisis before gunning them all down?

So, no star rating as i didn’t finish it. The ★☆☆☆☆ maybe ★★☆☆☆ i want to give might be unfair.
So. Doing a »what if South African neo-nazis helpt the slaveholders of the CSA win the war« novel? Fine. Showing the slaveholders as the point-of-view characters, and the neo-nazis in as mostly positiv light? F⸺ no! Parts of it read like author just wanted to right the n-word and came up with this as an excuse.

I gave up after the pages and pages of murder, murder, murder of the battle of the wilderness. For that, too, there was no need to write that in so many details.

(OK, maybe my skipping over the rest made me miss some bits. Apparently the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging are used to show that the CSA were not quite as evil as they theoretically could have been, or something. Which, you know, makes them look sort-of good by comparison. Yeah, no. Don’t need to read that.)

The historical notes at the end are a joke. Who cares about the 47th South Georgia Platoon or whatever the name was. »Oh, but every name I sat down really fought in that unit«. Meh, don’t care. Just invent a unit and spent your time with more important stuff, like, finding a way to not show slave holders, and those directly profiting from slavery, as sympathetic.

Eh. Too many good Nazis.

There ar other reasons this is not a classic.
I think it is always giving exactly the wrong amount of details. For example, in the main part the Nazi knight goes on and on about music. Really? Music? That is what is important?. I mean, that bit also shows that Nazi writer is an unreliable narrator. What, with there not having been any English composers. Even if yu don’t count Handel, there was, say, Purcell. Or a really minor one at the end: »The lorry would not start, and on investigation was found to have a broken connection in the feed pipe. It was tiresome and difficult to manage a makeshift in the dark by the light of torches, so the corporal ordered the party to march home.«. Who cares‽ A group of Nazis marching by. Done. If the details arn’t important, than don’t give them here.

Some points seem to be forgotten half way thru. At the beginning the Nazi knight worries about German women only giving birth to boys, not girls. In the end our Englishmen’s woman has given birth to a girl an it’s not discussed much, surely not in light of the »problem« in Germany.

And as a whole it is all talk, talk talk. At one time the author literally turns off the light so we don’t get a description of one of the few action senes. I also didn’t like how the author quickly kills off the reading Englishman and the good exiled Nazi at the end. Seemd tackt on.

My version also had quite a number of scannos (like typos, but uncorrected OCR errors). Looks like the editors got bored. The name »Hodenlohe« instead of Hohenlohe does sound funny to a German tho, in a »what ar yu, twelve?« kind of way.