Harry Turtledove's "The War That Came Early" series has suffered from two major flaws: a lack of plot development and a limited and repetitive perspective on events. Over five books, the grinding nature of a drawn-out stalemate has been viewed from the perspective of a dozen or so characters. Because most of them are ordinary soldiers, what the reader has gotten was a lot of the day-to-day monotony of combat, with the experiences basically interchangeable.

As this is the final volume of the series Turtledove has been forced to address the first of these flaws. With a need to wrap up events he gives developments an impetus that they had been lacking until now. Things actually start to happen, even if it does so in a rather boring and predictable manner. The improvement, though, might have been even more noticeable had he been able to draw upon a wider range of perspectives, but the fact that he still draws from the same limited range of experiences means that the problem with repetition still holds, as larger events are only told through gossip and radio reports. It's all a far cry of what Turtledove accomplished with his previous series (such as his Timeline-191 decalogy), and left me with the impression that he is just going through the motions at this point. ( )