In the Balance (Worldwar Series, Volume 1)

Rating:
Summary: fan of alternate endings and alike.
Review: this books was pretty good, it certainly filled the need i felt. some of the characters situations are a little boring and are not developed to well. but the story is great, when i read it i look at it like a modern day army fighting a wwII army. technology of the lizards is about what our technology is now, so that make's it interesting. it's not the best he could have made it but it is definitely worth reading, it can become addictive which is good, i recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: In the Balance
Review: I don't always like Turtledove- he can be long-winded at times. But this one I did enjoy. I believe science fiction is best when it only minimally changes reality- you get one or two allowances for impossible things, and then work from there. This is what Turtledove does- assume WWII, and assume alien invaders at that time. Both are possible- it just didn't happen. And the neat addition- the alien invaders aren't really that advanced. In fact, if they were to have arrived when we humans were another 50 years advanced, they'd be technologically inferior.

But they don't, and thus the conflict of the story. Turtledove writes the characters quite well, and I remained interested in all of them. You feel the real emotions of these characters; you want to see what they will do next; you understand why they respond to these problems because part of you would respond the same way. Sometimes you see a long list of characters at the beginning of a novel (such as War and Peace or the never-ending Wheel of Time series), and you think, "Oh, no- I'll never be able to keep them all straight!" In this case, each character is clear, distinct, and easily remembered. Thus Turtledove pulls us from the Russian steppes to Nazi Germany to alien space craft to the radar detectors of Britian and the battlefields of Chicago- and we eagerly follow along to see how next the world can stem off invasion. Or participate with it.

Rating:
Summary: fan of alternate endings and alike.
Review: this books was pretty good, it certainly filled the need i felt. some of the characters situations are a little boring and are not developed to well. but the story is great, when i read it i look at it like a modern day army fighting a wwII army. technology of the lizards is about what our technology is now, so that make's it interesting. it's not the best he could have made it but it is definitely worth reading, it can become addictive which is good, i recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Very Close to Pornography..
Review: I was never more disappointed in any book I read. The story went directly from the eve of invasion by the aliens to "Oh, my, they're here!" with no explination no how they got here. The book was also more concerned with the characters sex life. They spendt 90% of their time having sex, with the aliens forcing their captives to have sex, because they didn't reproduce sexually and were doing 'research'. Even earth people who weren't in captivity seemed to spend most of their time having sex. I will never read any by Mr. Turtledove again.

Rating:
Summary: I liked This Book
Review: The book In the Balance is a very good book about World War II, it is based on the fact that Hitler, and all the other leaders of the world at that time are uniting to conquer Aliens. The aliens are from a world called "Tosev 3" and they are very scaly and inhumanlike, which is why their nickname is "Lizards". There are some people who have spaceships and they are in space orbiting around Tosev 3 trying to destroy the planet.