More of Stirling’s exciting swashbuckling excitement…high marks for that. BUT!
The first 2 books in the trilogy restricted the date jumps to the chapter beginnings; but this book, the last one, jumps the dates AND locations multiple times within each chapter. And, instead of labelling each subsection-within-the-chapter with the appropriate date/location Stirling (or the publisher?) congregates all of the dates/locations at the front of the chapter, leaving us to figure out where/when we are from the context. I admit to having difficulty placing the strange names in context—when you couple that with where-the-hell-are-we?: California, Patagonia, Spain, Greece, Connecticut it becomes very confusing and not at all fun anymore. I found myself leaving a bookmark at the start of each chapter for appropriate reference to when/where we are.

With that out of the way…we come to Stirling’s real writing weakness: he doesn’t know how to end the series. The battles are going bad-to-good based upon our modern ability to think-out-of-the-box (i.e. in novel ways) and were quite enjoyable. And then the entire series ends when the “all powerful bad guy” is conveniently/fortuitously poisoned by a side-character—who is only rarely mentioned in the books, and doesn’t even belong there in the first place. Who is Helmut Mitler? I have no memory of him from the first book, and only one or two brief sentences mentioning him in book 2. At no point do I recall any mention of how a left-over Nazi a) survived WW2; b) was drafted into Walker’s retinue AND was still young enough to function. What did I miss? Is his existence in the story solely to provide a convenient death, at the right time, to end the story? Talk about cop-out! Stirling has the same problem with the succeeding Emberverse series… “we’ll just take a quick jaunt into never-never land, kill the evil there and return home lickedy-split to live happily ever after”. In both series the dénouements take place so quickly that it took me a while to realize that the stories had ended. There was no catharsis for me. Between this, and the “German”, I have to lower my rating for this book. ( )

I felt like this was a good story but in the last third when I saw the setup for how it was going to end I was not happy. The ending is contrived and weak, with a character added in this book that had only a brief one line mention in book 2 before becoming the major antagonist of the end game in the final book. ( )

This is the final book in the Nantucket trilogy, a series that begins with the island of Nantucket being thrown back in time from 1988 A.D. to 1250 B.C.

I’ve had mixed feelings about the trilogy. It was a fun premise, and there was a lot to like about the story. I particularly enjoyed the encounters with ancient cultures and watching the characters figure out how to survive and accomplish their goals with limited modern materials and resources. On the other hand, there were a lot of battles, to an extent that they felt tedious and repetitive to me.

The third book was no different in terms of my reaction. I really liked some parts, but there were other parts that made my eyes glaze over. I thought the more interesting parts were earlier in the book, and things got more tedious toward the end. I was reasonably satisfied with the ending itself, although there were some cliché aspects to it.

So… I enjoyed the series at times and was annoyed by it at other times. I’m glad I read it, but I’m definitely ready to move on to new things. ( )

We get to see the death of Walker and many of his followers through the wars that had to be fought to achieve it. No major character deaths on the Nantucketers side. He could easily come back to this as a series since Walker's eldest daughter did survive and has hate for the Islanders in her heart. Could be interesting to see how he were to take the storyline into a new alternative future. ( )

Loved it. A great conclusion to the Nantucket series. Perhaps the end gets condensed a bit much but it was a great book.