I enjoyed Rutherfurd's previous historical epic novels (Sarum, London, etc.) and New York was more of the same. Rutherfurd does an excellent job of weaving his fictional characters in with real people and events, and his method of following a particular family or two down through the generations works as well in the New World setting as it did in his previous Old World settings. I particularly enjoyed the way that different landmarks in New York kept showing up, especially ones that I have visited on my three trips to the Big Apple. Fraunces Tavern, Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park, the Empire State Building and Ellis Island all make their appearances in the novel, and my memories of those places helped me to visualize the story that much better.

I have a few minor quibbles with Rutherfurd's novel. The first is the large number of chapters to do with the Revolutionary War period. I found myself thinking after awhile that the story was never going to progress beyond the Revolutionary War and that I'd never get to see the more recent New York. Of course that wasn't the case, but it still might have been nice if either the Revolutionary period chapters had been shortened a bit, or if there had been more story told about more recent times. I was surprised, for example, that there weren't any African-American characters after the chapter on the Civil War Draft Riots. I had been hoping for a peek at the Harlem Renaissance or something similar.

My other criticism is in some ways more nitpicky, but is also easier to fix. There were two or three separate mentions of baseball (and I think, with the history of baseball and New York, that there could have easily been many more and it would have added to the story) and each one of them had an English sport term in it somewhere. The young Jewish kid in Brooklyn "supports the Dodgers" and the Yankees "make three runs in the inning," for example. To an English person, those terms make sense, but not to an American. An American baseball fan would say that the Jewish kid "roots for the Dodgers" and the Yankees "score three runs in the inning." A good editor - particularly an American one - should be able to catch something like that. Like I said, it's a nitpicky criticism, but it was very jarring for me and it took me completely out of the story when I read those phrases. I was distracted by thinking about how an English person would talk about baseball, rather than staying involved with the characters that Rutherfurd has obviously so lovingly created and brought to life.

I don't want to end with a criticism, so I'll say this: I really really enjoyed this book, and I think that this would be a great way to teach history in a school. The characters are interesting and they make history come alive, while also bringing a better understanding of how the events of one generation affect the events of the next.