I got this book in 2011, three years after I bought its sequel, 1633, in 2011, when Tam K. visited and commented from time to time, and a VftPlanche was the next best thing next to an Instalanche (which was over the course of a couple hours, but VftPlanches, although, smaller, stretched over days, and I still sometimes get a click from deep in her archives). We were bloggers once, and young. These days, the only ‘lanches I get are when a new Asian LLM comes scraping content.
Ah, well. The 2026 Winter Reading Challenge has a category “Set in Two Time Periods,” and although The Sins of the Fathers has a reprinted log entry set 100+ years in the past, I could not count it in the arbitrary good conscience I use when making up the actual rules for the contest. This book, however, starts in then-modern West Virginia before the town of Grantville is transported to 1632 Germany. It’s only a chapter, and then we’re in the second time period for the rest of the book. One presumes that 1633 takes place exclusively in one time period, so I’ve glad I found this one first.
So: A group of union mine workers are at a wedding of one of their own to the daughter of some uptight YUPPIE types when “The Ring Of Fire” takes the high school where the wedding is taking place from the West Virginia mountains along with several miles, including the town, to 1632 in the region now known as Germany. As they’re all good old boys, they’re armed to the teeth, which gives them an advantage as they try to remake their portion of the plains into America.
The book kinda has several threads in it: The pairing off of transplanted Americans with the attractive members of the locals; politicking as they talk about how they would like to govern themselves and the new nation they hope to bring forth; and some battle scenes where the Americans have to defeat the local powers of the day and work with their growing allies, which includes Jews.
To be honest, I kind of thought some groundwork was getting laid for some intrigues where pairs might start working at odds with each other, vying for power, but that had not really happened by the end of the novel–although the book has several sequels, so who knows what might be to come.
I found the politicking parts the most dragging, because a lot of it was mere speechifying. It’s a pretty big cast of characters, too, who are sometimes referred to by their first names and sometimes their last names, which made me sometimes think, “Which one is this again?” But it was an all right read. And it did bring the Thirty Years’ War into a little more familiarity and perspective. I read a book about Swedish history in 2013, and I remember tweeting at the time about how the Swedish leader at the time, Gustav Vasa, was interesting only to have a Swedish woman say, “Ackshually….” However, he’s presented sympathetically here (as are guns and a lot of the concepts of the Founding Fathers’), so no sucker punch ever came.
So if you like your alt-historical fiction, a blend of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (which I read in college), Puck of Pook’s Hill, a Kipling novel I read in 2010), some more modern alt-history people like Turtledove and Stirling, you could probably do worse.
As the book was over 500 pages, it counts as a two-fer (a book that could have filled two categories in the Winter Reading Challenge).
