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A review by rhodered
Broken Blades by L.A. Witt, Aleksandr Voinov
Did not finish book.
I put off reading this for a few weeks because I'm just not a big war novel fan. And I was rather dreading bleakness, grey walls, tense prisoners, nasty guards, bombs, etc.
But in the end it was all fairly boring. I think a large part of the boredom was due to the fact that both the leads are dull. They are handsome, honorable, tall, intelligent, dutiful men. Decent guys who had a stressful war. But there's not much else to them. You don't get any feeling for what an Iowa background means (how a farmer would wind up on the Olympic fencing team is incomprehensible BTW.) You also don't get much feeling for the German aside from him being a "good German". And, aside from the Hitler thing, there don't seem to be any class or cultural differences exhibited between the two men in a meaningful or detailed way. Which, trust me, you don't need a war for an American farmer and a German aristocrat to have a whole bunch of differences stressing and enlivening their relationship.
The authors are relying heavily on the war and prison situation to lend excitement to the story. As I'm just not that interested in these, it fell flat.
But in the end it was all fairly boring. I think a large part of the boredom was due to the fact that both the leads are dull. They are handsome, honorable, tall, intelligent, dutiful men. Decent guys who had a stressful war. But there's not much else to them. You don't get any feeling for what an Iowa background means (how a farmer would wind up on the Olympic fencing team is incomprehensible BTW.) You also don't get much feeling for the German aside from him being a "good German". And, aside from the Hitler thing, there don't seem to be any class or cultural differences exhibited between the two men in a meaningful or detailed way. Which, trust me, you don't need a war for an American farmer and a German aristocrat to have a whole bunch of differences stressing and enlivening their relationship.
The authors are relying heavily on the war and prison situation to lend excitement to the story. As I'm just not that interested in these, it fell flat.