Daniel Smith’s Reviews > Into the Darkness > Status Update

I think some of my antipathy toward the plot in this book is that I'm reading Follett's Winter of the World at the same time (very slowly). WotW manages to be historical, heartbreaking, hopeful, and humorous at once. It's unfortunate for Into the Darkness that I'm reading both at the same time. They're similar enough to be comparable, but WotW revolves around real events and just feels more impactful in every way.

This feels like a military planning exercise, not a novel. I acknowledge Turtledove's painstaking thoughts on what a real-life World War in his fictitious world would be like, and kudos to him for his attempt at realism and completeness. That being said, it's really uninteresting as a story. I didn't pick this up to read a hypothetical battle plan for war taking place in another universe. Interesting; not fun to read

I've become exhausted with this book. It's managed to be such a slog, while remaining just interesting enough to keep me from hating it or putting it down, that I just don't have any more will to fight. Disappointingly, I think I'll have to forego my usual long-form reviews and will intend to use these updates to piece something together. I just don't have the energy left after this book has drained me to review.

To continue my earlier point - pacing seems way off. As I've mentioned before, all the impactful war events happen off-screen. We spend our whole time with characters' thoughts and opinions about these off-screen events that are pretty momentous (conquering, defeat, etc.). The first 80% of the book was just a slow grind as one country dominates all the others in the World War they're having. Could've been a chapter.

I'm struggling to cross the finish line of this book. It's getting a incrementally more interesting as some of the (too many) characters are finally crossing paths, more than 85% into the book. I think my issues with this book are partly from expectations that maybe weren't fair to the book. That being said, the book jacket gave me those expectations, so perhaps the editors need to take another look at this.

This passage leads me to a choice by the author that doesn't make sense to me. This is supposed to be essentially a reimagining of WW2 in a fantasy world. Magic has been peppered throughout (guns = wands, warplanes = dragons, bombs = "eggs."), however all of these have literally just been magical equivalents of real things. Just now, over 60% in we see some interesting magic. It feels like a sadly missed opportunity.

Finally - all the races in this book are only distinguished (both by themselves and by the narrator) by their clothing styles and their hair colors. Almost no cultural references are made or appear to matter to these folks. All that matters is "redheads" vs "blonds" and "kilts" vs "trousers." This seems like a bizarre choice, especially as the only trait the characters have in common is hatred for the other races.

The pacing - the most interesting parts of the war are skipped over in a sentence, while we're subjected to paragraphs and paragraphs of the characters' thoughts about the action that got skipped over, many of whom have the exact same (or directly opposite) opinions about the same subjects. This makes them feel indistinguishable and uninteresting.

I'm struggling with immersing myself in this book. As I've mentioned in a prior post, we're just not given enough time with any of the (numerous) characters to care about them. So nothing that happens to them feels impactful.
Another issue is that they all feel like they're invincible. This book is basically a translation of WW2 into fantasy, but none of the 17 main characters have died, which seems unlikely at least

Once I reconciled myself with the type of book - definitely different than I expected - I have started enjoying it a little. Still far too many characters who are far too similar to really feel like individuals. Half of them could be removed without hurting the story, but that's just my opinion. Really weird fixation on blowjobs by one of the female characters. Feels like it doesn't belong with the rest of the story.