Bettie's Books

2 of 5 stars bookshelves: summer-2014, e-book, net-galley, wwi, published-2013, next

HarperCollins UK. The Friday Project.

Description: Johan Thoms (pronounced Yo-han Tomes) was born in Argona, a small town twenty-three miles south of Sarajevo, during the hellish depths of winter 1894.

Little did he know that his inability to reverse a car would change the course of 20th Century History forever…

Johan Thoms is poised for greatness. A promising student at the University of Sarajevo, he is young, brilliant, and in love with the beautiful Lorelei Ribeiro. He can outwit chess masters, quote the Kama Sutra, and converse with dukes and drunkards alike. But he cannot drive a car in reverse. And as with so much in the life of Johan Thoms, this seemingly insignificant detail will prove to be much more than it appears. On the morning of June 28, 1914, Johan takes his place as the chauffeur to Franz Ferdinand and the royal entourage and, with one wrong turn, he forever alters the course of history.

Opening to the prologue: 2009, Northern England: I sat with my grandfather Ernest in a very comfortable, spacious ward in the hospital in Goole. The doctors had said he would not live for longer than a week.

Goole is as Goole sounds, a dirty-grey inland port in Yorkshire not far from England's east coast. More than one hundred years earlier Count Dracula might well have grimaced on his way through, en route from Whitby to Carfax Abbey.

The idea behind this story is a feasible up to a point; I couldn't buy into the whole quilt trip that Johan took upon himself and which subsumed the rest of his life.

The modern flippant tone does not help immerse the reader into the period, and one-liners akin to a Friday night Workingman's Club stand-up comedian completely ruined the spell for me.

Timely publication to cash in on the hundred year anniversary, and that cover is splendid, however that strapline 'How One Man Scorched the Twentieth Century But Didn't Mean To' is clunky isn't it.

In the interests of honest reviewing I can only give two black pawns as a rating.




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