A Generation Rising

I need historical fiction to weave facts and fiction together in a believable, interesting and compelling way. This book failed to do that for me. Historical places and events were shoehorned in randomly–e.g. a visit to King Ludwig's castle at Neuschwanstein by a German peasant family so the son can read a school report to the gathered visitors on the history of the castle? Too contrived for my tastes.

The author's notes at the end of various chapters also left me feeling like this was a second-rate project. He cites Wikipedia as the source for most of his historical sources. Fine to use that as a jumping-off place for further research, but not your main source.

The author did a little better using primary sources of LDS missionary letters and writings for the pre-WW1 events, but this part of the story involved minor characters. Not enough to bring the whole story to a believable, reasonable level of good historical fiction writing.

I know this author has written a lot of popular historical fiction around LDS themes, but I don't think this book or the series is up to that level.