From about 2001 to 2008, when I was still in high school and undergraduate studies, I was a voracious fan of Mr. Turtledove’s works. I completely finished his Worldwar saga, read all the way up through the American Empire trilogy, and devoured not a few of his single-shot novels. Now, after a hiatus on reading-for-fun during grad school, I’ve finally come back to finish Turtledove’s epic Southern Victory saga, but the charms are finally beginning to wear thin.Most of the problems with Turtledove’s Settling Accounts: Return Engagment are the very same problems he’s always had. For instance, there are 15+ perspective characters, but I’m hard pressed to care about any of them, because they’re all cookie-cutter cross-sections of society who generally share the exact same habits of thinking (the sole exception being Nazi-esque characters, who are constantly in a bipolar rage and never have any more depth than the average YouTube comment). And we follow up on each character exactly every three chapters for exactly 5 pages, even if nothing interesting is going on in their piece of the cross-section (which is the majority of the time). Maybe I’ve just grown spoiled by the character development in George R.R. Martin’s fiction. Maybe I’m expecting too much from the modern-day equivalent of a pulp fiction story. But I’ve grown to expect more from the “master” of alternate history, and he doesn’t deliver.But the especial fault with Return Engagement is a sort of intensification of an old one of Turtledove’s: lazy worldbuilding. Turtledove’s strategy with this installment is the same tired formula of cutting and pasting different names and nationalities onto existing history. It’s only that here, the Elmer’s glue is practically soaking the pages. To put it bluntly, the entire Settling Accounts tetralogy is a not-too-clever smear of American neo-conservatism. The Confederate States of America’s bumbling vice president is named “Don Partridge” (i.e. Dan Quayle), the vindictive former plantation owner-turned-agitator is named "Anne Colleton" (i.e. Ann Coulter), George H.W. Bush is a Confederate pilot despite his family coming from Ohio in real history, and General Patton’s neocon-like foreign policy is shoehorned into the Confederacy despite his mother hailing from California in real history. The sheer offensiveness of this (and I’m not speaking from any love of neocons) would be tolerable if only it were offset by suspense over the outcomes. But because I know how real history played out, I already know that the C.S.A. loses in Book 4, that the secret weapon F.D.R. is developing is the atomic bomb, and that Jefferson Pinkard’s political prisoner camps are going to evolve into a parallel Holocaust, but with Blacks. Turtledove’s storytelling imagination seems limited to the initial idea for the story.But if you know all that going in and just want to see a really general picture of what WWII might have looked like on American soil, the Settling Accounts series is a fair read. And if you are willing to wade through pages and pages of being reminded for the 100th time in idiotically blunt terms that Joshua Blackford is a cocksure preteen, that Leonard O'Doull curses in Quebecois French, and that Sam Carsten religiously applies zinc oxide to his skin every time he's not north of the Arctic Circle, Return Engagement is at least a mildly entertaining introduction to real history.
The action in this volume of the series is really steady and the war its self is fascinating. During this volume I felt I could guess where things were pretty much going, but by the end of the book I felt like what is going to happen next will not be so easy to predict.One thing that seem to stand out in this volume was how for the first time in a while the narration seemed a little unbalanced between the sides of the wars. We get to see into both the highest and lowest parts of the Confederate States as well as civilian, government, and military characters. On the U.S. side of the story you didn't get quite that grand of a view, there seemed little civilian point of view and you only got to see the bottom and middle parts of the government/military. I'm not so sure this is a bad thing because at this point in the story most of the things I want to see in detail are happening in the C.S.A. Above all the most fascinating thing is the situation with the C.S.A.'s blacks. It's horrifying and mesmerizing at the same time, like a gory scary movie you know is going to scare and disgust you but you can't look away. Knowing what it parallels in real history, knowing where it's headed, makes it all that harder to look away from. It's so discomforting and I feel such fear and apprehension for these fictional characters stuck in that situation, which I as the reader know is only going to get worse. The worst part is thinking, "what would I do in that situation?" and knowing there really would be no good or safe choice other than to have not been in that situation.This part of the series also had me pondering some of the ways that books as a story telling medium are so different as t.v. or movies. I don't see how this series could ever be turned into any kind of tv/movie, not just because of it's length but its content. By taking that one simple historical what if and extrapolating out as far as the author does I think it would make too many American's think too much about the American spirit and look at how close parts of us came to decisions that are so much worse than those we have made as a people.
What do You think about Return Engagement (2005)?
Harry Turtledove has some interesting propositions in this book. I think I would have been better served to read his Great War series before picking this one up, but the library didn't have the first in the series, so I started with this. The book is very engaging, easy to read... gives you a lot to think about. My only complaints are the number of characters (there are so many that it took me about 350 pages in to get them all straight, and even then missed 2 important connections that I should have gotten - figured that out around 450) and the repetition (I think there are so many characters he had to have them keep repeating the same things to keep them straight himself!). All in all, a good read, I'll definitely be picking up the next in the series.
—Meg
Settling Accounts: Return Engagement by Harry Turtledove is the first book of the third series that Turtledove has written in his alternate history series that postulates what the world would be like if the South had won the American Civil War and successfully secceded from the United States of America. In this series, the timeline has advanced up to the 1940s and World War II. In previous books in this timeline, Turtledove has detailed a second American Civil War, World War I, the reconstruction period afterwards, and now WWII. The easiest way to describe the book is to say that it's similar to most other Harry Turtledove alternate history books. I you haven't read any Turtledove, then you might think this is criticism. Those of you who have read his work know that this simply means that he sticks to his successful formula of telling a gripping story using about a dozen primary point of view characters, and easily over a hundred characters overall to tell a complex story and delves into all aspects of the war and it's impact on society.In this timeline, the USA won WWI and soundly defeated the Confederate States of America (CSA), and ever since they, they chafed at the harsh economic ruin imposed on them by their neighbor. This allowed the radical and hate filled Jake Featherson to rise to power and drive his country towards a looming confrontation with the USA. The previous series, American Empire, details this rise to power, and Settling Accounts starts right with the first unannounced attack on the USA. Turtledove does his always excellent job of using his characters to show a variety of points of view, on both sides of the conflict. He includes not only the ground war from both an infantry, armor, and general's point of view, but also views into the war at sea and in the air, the politics on both sides of the conflict, espionage, the home front, and also the harsh world that blacks are forced to live in under CSA rule. One of the central elements of the story is how Jake Featherson's personal vendetta against blacks drives him fully into the role that Adolf Hitler held in our real history, but replacing Hitler's hatred of Jews with Featherson's hate towards blacks. It's both fascinating and horrifying to read about the same kinds of atrocities happening on American soil that happened in Nazi Germany, and how easy Turtledove shows it could therefore happen anywhere, under the right circumstances.I can't recommend this book enough. Even Turtledove's worst book is well worth reading, and this is one of his better ones. In addition to his signature multiple viewpoint characters, he does an excellent job of weaving real life historical figures into the lives of his fictional main characters, as well as showing how even small events can lead to large consequences or significant discoveries.
—Joel Flank
Personally, I'm a fan of alternate histories and the "what-if" scenarios that people can spend days dreaming up about. This series in particular goes on the "What-if" scenario of the Gettysburg campaign in the civil war. Naturally, there's more books preceding this particular one, but this book covers the path of the Confederate States of America successfully seceding (try saying THAT several times quickly!) and becoming its own nation, especially when pressure from France and the United Kingdom comes in. There has already been a few more wars between the two countries, particularly the Great War where the Americas experienced trench warfare. This series covers the equivalent of the Second World War, with both original and thought-up equivalents for the equipment, and sides and circumstances that would make most tilt their heads in slight confusion.There is a LOT of exposition and talking done in this, mainly because Turtledove sees it fit to cover the war from both sides and with many different characters. People such as General Patton (a Confederate General in this case) might be covered, and then the scene will shift to African-American guerillas, then to a US tank (or barrel, in this case) crew. There are those who might find it a bit dry, but I don't mind raw detail, so I didn't find it much of a problem. Those who like Alternate History should be warned again that there's plenty of dialog, but there's a very interesting history being played out through it.
—David Lee
