Why? Well, though Turtledove is no great literary stylist, he has several things going for him: 1) He knows history, and he knows it well. When he spins an alternate history scenario, you just know that it's been carefully thought out and is historically plausible. (This is even true of the Worldwar series, which suffers a credibility gap because of its suspiciously low-tech, all-too-human alien invaders.)  2) His characters, often derived from genuine historical sources, are sympathetic and real. You genuinely believe in them, you feel for them, you care about what happens to them. In this regard, American Front and its predecessor volume, How Few Remain are very much like fictionalized, alternate history versions of Ken Burns' lauded Civil War documentary series on PBS.

On the other hand, it's this very quality that makes it arguable that Turtledove's books are not really novels. They're more like a series of extended vignettes, stitched together into a rough linear narrative that one would be hard-pressed to describe as a "plot." In truth, the plot and main character of all of these books is history itself; the protagonists are merely scenery. In American Front, as in many of Turtledove's other alternate histories (and notably excepting of The Guns of the South and The Two Georges), there are simply too many characters in too many different theatres of war and far too much jump-cutting between them. And at a certain point it all becomes a grey blur.

For obvious reasons, I loved the scenes on the Canadian Front, as the outnumbered and outgunned Canadian Army manages to keep vastly superior US forces at bay, just as I'm sure dedicated Southerners enjoy the scenes set in the South and the Midwest. I commend Turtledove for his encyclopedic knowledge of history. His understanding of Canadian military history and Canada's military potential circa World War I is frankly astounding, and I also enjoy the way he has pitted genuine historical personages like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson against each other. Despite my criticisms, in the end I came away from American Front with a deeper appreciation for the world I really live in. However bad reality really was -- things could have been far worse.