rosseroo's review
3.0
Like basically everyone else who seems to have read this series, I'm a lifelong fan of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman series, and turned to this after I had read all the Flashman there is in the world. This is very openly an American version of Flashman, both in concept, framework, and (anti)hero -- albeit a fairly inferior version. The writing simply isn't as smooth, funny, or historically astute, but on the whole it's a reasonably fun confection.
The hero is born a bastard in the mid-1870s (not coincidentally, Flashman spent some time in America in 1875 in Flashman and the Redskins, so...). After an opening vignette, the story more or less outlines his childhood and teen misadventures that lead him into Army. There, he is send to the Southwest to fight in the Indian Wars, then on to West Point, then on to Florida and Cuba for the Spanish-American War, and then on to China for the Boxer Rebellion. And of course, like Flashman, he gets sexually entangled with a number of ladies along the way and runs into various historical figures (for example, Teddy Roosevelt, Stephen Crane, etc.).
For me, the book covers too many years and too much ground in its pages -- it would have benefited from covering just one episode, maybe the Spanish-American War, in greater detail. It's also a touch soft compared to Flashman, Travers isn't the complete and total cad that Flashman is, and that kind of waters things down a bit. But if you've run out of Flashman to read, you could do worse than this -- I'll certainly read the next in the series at some point.
The hero is born a bastard in the mid-1870s (not coincidentally, Flashman spent some time in America in 1875 in Flashman and the Redskins, so...). After an opening vignette, the story more or less outlines his childhood and teen misadventures that lead him into Army. There, he is send to the Southwest to fight in the Indian Wars, then on to West Point, then on to Florida and Cuba for the Spanish-American War, and then on to China for the Boxer Rebellion. And of course, like Flashman, he gets sexually entangled with a number of ladies along the way and runs into various historical figures (for example, Teddy Roosevelt, Stephen Crane, etc.).
For me, the book covers too many years and too much ground in its pages -- it would have benefited from covering just one episode, maybe the Spanish-American War, in greater detail. It's also a touch soft compared to Flashman, Travers isn't the complete and total cad that Flashman is, and that kind of waters things down a bit. But if you've run out of Flashman to read, you could do worse than this -- I'll certainly read the next in the series at some point.
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