I like me a big fat historical novel for holiday down-times, and this one, set in World War I, filled the bill this past Christmas. There's lots and lots of plot for the various characters who embody their class/nationality/political opinions. Otherwise, few of them were very compelling, and I could not wholly bring myself either to love the protagonists wholeheartedly, nor to hate the ones who were obviously intended to be despised. Nonetheless, between the historical and the personal, there was enough there to keep me reading and interested; if nothing else, I learned quite a bit about a subject that one simply cannot avoid in these, the centenary years of the first World War.
