disappointing.

Great premise but poorly executed. Overall 3 stars is also kind of generious.

I bought this after listening to his World War series which I LOVED! It's sort of an 'in the trenches' view of the story. The characters are bland and indistinctive. There's no connection to the political side which would give the reader / listener a larger view of what's at stake for the countries involved. His World War series had diversity in it's characters with a full spectrum of perspectives ranging from world leaders to civilians, Officers to privates. Characters who were brave to ones who were overwhelmed. Bookish to butch.

He knows a lot about this period of time but sometimes he can get unnecessarily detailed which can spoil the flow. He also keeps reminding us of the things we do know and he falls into certain tropes. I do still like his writing but this is not his best work.

The Narrator was a mixed bag. It's difficult to describe but he has a very American accent while in this book the American presence is minimal. Some narrators can have a 'Mid Atlantic' accent. Well spoken and strangely in between English and American with no harsh or distinctive accent. One like that would have been more suitable for the tone of this book. I don't know about their accuracy but I actually liked the accents for the characters and he put in a 5 Star read in terms of the dialogue, but his read for everything else was unbelievably bland.

The other parts to this series do sound more interesting so I will probably return to them later. But not immediately.

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Interesting concept - almost delivered...

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Yes and no. The idea is brilliant - the narration was awful !!! It ended up being hard work listening to John Allen Nelson.

What was most disappointing about Harry Turtledove’s story?

Too many Americanisms and not enough understanding of other nations. Turtledove, at times, appears lazy and repeats a lot of detail. I think he tried to involve too many characters/storylines and it was a struggle to keep up as the writing jumped from one character to the next. With so many characters I found it hard to care about them and during the action scenes I wasn't concerned whether a character lived or died.

How could the performance have been better?

Getting anyone other than John Allen Nelson to read it. He has no idea how to deliver an audiobook. All of his European accents were the same, whether the character be French, German, Polish etc. And as for his British accents !!! In typical American style, all British accents were upper class English accents, no matter where they came from. At one point HT describes a British soldier as coming from Wales...Nelson's dialogue for him was no different to the other British characters...English NOT Welsh. He even struggled with some English words !!!

If this book were a film would you go see it?

I would.

Any additional comments?

I think Audible should lower this, given the poor standard of narration or it should be re-recorded with another narrator.

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2 people found this helpful

my view

I liked the story having read it before, the reader was not good accents awfull.

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Terrible

What disappointed you about Hitler's War?

The author has tried to be too clever by including so many characters and locations, but it just makes it hard to follow and leaves too many loose ends. Why has he included the Sino-Japanese War and the Spanish Civil War in the book? - it seems a pointless waste of time to me - maybe the only way he felt he could include Americans in the book.The narrator is just plain awful.

Would you ever listen to anything by Harry Turtledove again?

No

How could the performance have been better?

A narrator with a bit of feeling and one that has done a bit of homework on accents before reading the book.

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2 people found this helpful

unimaginative and repetitive drivel.

The story was derivative with many characters feeling copy and pasted with a name change. same facts or views are repeated endlessly. the voice acting was diabolical. Must run as one of the worst attempts at multiple accents I have ever heard. Don't waste your time and money on this novel.

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3 people found this helpful

Tragically Bad Rendition

I enjoyed the actual book and it was a good read, like most of Turtledove's writing.

However, the narration... Perhaps a native English speaker would have been a better choice or one who did some preparation on accents, or even better, accept that he just doesn't do accents and stay away from them.

Ruined the story and that's a waste of money I'll never get back. To summarise; About as interesting as Dick Van Dyke's bizarre accents in "Mary Poppins" if he were to read sections from the Financial Times.

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