Your review Interesting take on the social and political mores of the time. Sometimes a tedious slog but worth it. Names keep popping up that are not in the genealogy charts or the appendix. Some very interesting characters introduced that hopefully will be in future works. Wiping out the anti's, Semitics and witches, was clearly a simpler task in those days. ( )

I like the Ring of Fire, but good God, this was tedious. The writing isn't totally clunky or anything, and there are some decent bits - anything relating to the actual plot was just fine. But a very large chunk of the book is devoted to the kind of infinitely boring family dynamics that are only of any interest to people who have to deal with those families at Thanksgiving. Seriously, if I wanted to read about small-town Appalachian dynastic politics I would be reading a totally different genre. ( )

A very nice read tying together some of the loose ends of the previous books with some new twists. ( )

Riding a motorbike in the 17th century means no helmet laws but lousy roads. Oh, and you might scare the horses. Find out more.

This is my least favorite of The Ring of Fire books so far. It has almost no surprises, the characters are totally uninteresting, and the ending doesn't really tie up any of the loose ends created in the rest of the novel. On top of that, the book dwells heavily on the personal lives of those uninteresting characters. We get to see what their entire families are like and how they got to be the way they are, but I had no interest in knowing anything about them. I didn't care about what was about to happen to them, let alone, what had happened to the rest of their families 20 or more years ago. This is most pronounced with Missy's story, which is primarily composed of telling us how generations of the women in her family didn't feel like using birth control. She is the most egregious example of excessive back story, but I was never convinced that I should really care about anyone in the book except maybe Denise.

The last chapter or two of the book are interesting in that they start to get into what happens after Mike Stearns loses the election, but that is one of the very few reasons you might want to pick up this book. ( )