|
|
|
Reviews too brief to need their own page:
[New York: Leisure Books, 1984] Ever notice that some rating systems give an item up to five stars, and with others it's one or two thumbs up or down? For this book, you need a five-thumb system, all of them pointing downward. It's not just that it gives a bad representation of the RevWar -- compared to some of the other books I've reviewed, its presentation is entirely innocuous, and so far in the background of the story that I doubt I growled at it more than a half-dozen times. It's just a bad book, period, filled with despicable characters. Within the first fifty pages, the nominal "hero" has impersonated his brother, cheated someone out of large sums of money, married a woman under false circumstances, then raped her. After this, Benedict proceeds through the rest of the story, under the blissful assumption that she has made him entirely charming and her readers -- not to mention his much-abused but utterly stupid wife -- will love him. While the story is nominally set in England and Charleston during the RevWar, it is almost entirely a domestic story, and could have been plopped down in pretty much any time and place, with the most minimal of editing. Tarleton has three or four mentions or brief appearances, the silliest being when he "steals" some horses from the protagonists' plantation. (During March-June, 1780 time frame, when he was re-mounting the Legion.) The female lead spends quite some time harping on about the "theft" while simultaneously waving around the receipt he gave her for the confiscated animals. What part of "there's a war on" don't you understand, madam? And so on. There's so much else wrong with this book that I can't even bother to get worked up about a few stock Ban-clichés.
[Boston: The Christopher Publishing House, 1941] Lots of bad history woven together into a nonsensical old novel with a wonderfully clever title. According to the subtitle, this is "A tale of the career of Major John André, spy-extraordinary of the British Army in the American Revolution." Another possible subtitle would be "how John André would have single-handedly won the American Revolution, if it hadn't been for that spot of bother near West Point." Very strange, lots of fun, and Ban Tarleton gets to be a general by 1777. He would've enjoyed that.
[Dell Publishing Company, New York; 1983] Another romance, this one guilty of inflicting boredom more than anything else. Generic Bloody Ban, generic RevWar crap, dull and generic plot. Louisiana Creole with a letter of marque from the Continental Congress meets Loyalist beauty, who predictably turns traitor as quickly as possible once her hormones kick in, and after that it's all paint by numbers. Ho-hum.
| Return to the Main Page | Last updated by the Webmaster on January 30, 2004 |