Look Away

OK, now these are fun. It's got me wanting to do ACW again. I may just buy a Springfield musket...even though I haven't fired the last ACW firearm I bought.
Anyway, Coyle went undercover for these books, serving with ACW re-enactment regiments, which just sounds like fun!
He does a good job with the fighting of course, but it's the social interaction that I think he really displays talent, in making them interesting and relevant without bogging down a war novel. He also does a really good job of having his characters grow within the story. I'm reading the second one now, I can't wait to find out who wins.

The first in a series about the American Civil Way from one of America’s foremost military fiction writers. The book follows the fortunes of two families through the build to an execution of the American Civil War. The Bannon brothers, Irish immigrants now living in Boston with their power driven tyrannical father have always had each other. When they fall in love with the same girl, her accidental death and James Bannon’s banishment to the South to attend VMI follows. There, James makes friends with Will McPherson, son of a farm family in Winchester VA. When war breaks out, James is swept away by his friend and the alienation he feels towards home and family, to fight for the South. His brother Kevin, in order to prove his love to show more a girl from high society, find himself and get away from the rule of his father enlists as an officer in the New Jersey Volunteers. The brothers find themselves thrown into a war of brutality, carnage, suffering and length that nobody anticipated. Both find support in themselves and others, James in Will and his sister Mary-Beth and Kevin in his love, Harriet Shields. The book cover battles from the 1st Manasass to Gettysburg where the brothers meet for the first time in years. The author has one a serious amount of research on the conduct of the people both in and out of the war. The main characters are all based on actual persons and the accounts of battles and the events in and around them are real. It makes for a steady flow of the text and the action as well as lending a great amount of believability. It is an entertaining book, probably more so for history or civil wars fans than most but well written. The characters do tend to get caught in a 2-D state of emotional development and always seem to fall back to mundane or repetitive states when the confronted with decisions. show less

Good writer, depicts times and warfare well. Contrived, of course, to make story work-- but the dilemmas faced by people during those times are presented well.

one of the best books on the civil war I have read. This is the first book, with the sequel being Until the End. The story features two brothers one on each side and paints a gripping picture of the war and its effects.