Matt McAvoy Book Review

This is a superb book, and Lance Wilkins is an exceptional writer.  He has a use of syntax and a writing style which are utterly engaging and wonderfully endearing, and I found myself gripped from start to finish.  Caught in the Crossfire is, in some ways, a very simple tale of a rescue mission, though it is not really the story itself which is the real point of this book; that is simply a three-act mechanism to craft this world Lance brings us into – which he does flawlessly; you feel every bit as if you’re right there with them, in the mud, the camps, the occupied towns of civil war-era Boston.  The author does an outstanding job of drawing us into the fear and sheer bewilderment of the men (and women) who were fighting against their fellow countrymen, in the name of a king they would never meet, thousands of miles away.  This is a very cerebral narrative; we are brought inside the head of the main protagonist, who fights for the Continentals.  We get to share his every thought, every doubt, every moment of self-condemnation, in vivid detail.  Moments are drawn out into long, complex thought processes – though not in a boring or tedious way, but rather in a manner which engages us and won’t let us go; we are there at every step with this very young lieutenant, who single-mindedly cares only about rescuing his love, captured during a spying mission.  In some ways, the whole book is a monologue.  I have to say, in some cases this style can be troublesome to adhere to as a reader, but in this tale it is crafted to perfection.  This is a very engrossing and enjoyable book to read.

As I said, the plot is simple, but the composition as a whole is grand.  Lance portrays 18^th century wartime America in a way that makes it appear effortless, though I am sure it wasn’t; there is tremendous attention to detail in this book, and the author certainly knows his subject matter well.  Sure, perhaps the enemy are a little one-dimensional, the British redcoats styled as typically ruthless and ill-disciplined (aren’t they always), but character actions and interactions generally are far from your standard tropes; they make mistakes; they have regrets; they lose their cool and they are occasionally ambiguously neither good nor bad; sometimes they help each other; sometimes they turn on each other – they are, to put it frankly, and for want of a better word, human, and Lance is excellent at writing about the human condition in the most challenging of moral circumstances.

This book is wonderful, and I enjoyed it very much.  If you like historical action, gritty and realistic, with a human touch, you’ll do well to find much better than this simple civil war tale – highly recommended.