Captivating Historical Narrative

Galveston
P.G. Nagle
Evennight Books (2010)
Kindle Edition
Print Length: 384 pages
Rated 5 stars of 5 possible

Galveston is the third of P.G. Nagle's Far Western Civil War series, and takes place mainly in Texas. I have not yet read the prior two volumes in this series.  While enough reference is made to earlier events to make the reader curious, Galveston can be read as a stand-alone novel despite being part of a larger story. It is connected to the other novels in the series mainly by the characters involved. Events depicted in this novel do not heavily depend on what came before, yet the context in which these events occurred may be better understood by reading the previous novels in this series.

For the most part, I found Galveston to be well-written and captivating. I had trouble putting it down... but there was a small language issue - or I thought so at first. The dialogue seemed a bit stilted and unnatural to me, so I stopped and gave some further thought to the dialoge and the historical setting. The American Civil War took place about 150 years ago. Given that the English language is growing and evolving, it seems to me that the differences in the characters' speech and the way English is spoken today can be attributed to the evolution of our language in that interval of time. I have no doubt the English language as spoken in the mid-19th century was quite different than the English langage as spoken in this 21st century. Once allowing for the changes that occur to a living langage over time, I gave no further thought to some of the sentence structure of the dialoge being odd to the ear... By then, I was too involved in the story to care about any oddness overly much anyway.

I loved the historical background around and within which the charaters interacted with each other, and I will most definitely seek out the remainder of this series to read them in order.  Recommended to historical fiction lovers and civil war buffs as well as those who love a good story. Based on the Mobi format of the novel given to me by the publisher in exchange for this review. This review has been simlutaneously posted at Amazon.com, Dragon Views and LibraryThing as well as being posted at other appropriate locations on the world wide web.