*Note* I received this book through the Goodreads First Reads program.

I turn to history books when I have a need for dense facts and am trying to piece together a particular event/person that interests me. I turn to historical novels when I want good stories with a little extra flavor that comes from learning history by more or less accident or osmosis. The only flaw in this plan is that I can't always tell where the fiction ends and the history begins...

While reading Blaze of Glory by Jeff Shaara, I kept having to ask myself "is this really a novel? Where's the story?"

I read Michael Shaara's Killer Angels about ten years ago and I don't remember it well enough to draw comparisons, but this is the first book I've read by his son Jeff Shaara. While I received this book through the Goodreads First Reads program, it took me a while to summon the courage (and the time) to take on 400+ pages of what I correctly guessed would be mostly top-down military strategy, focusing on the lead-up through immediate aftermath of the Battle of Shiloh on 6-7 April, 1862. The prose is irritating in its repetition of the exact same sentence structure, over and over. The narration alternates among various Northern and Southern generals including Grant, Sherman, Prentiss and Johnston, and occasionally dips into the consciousnesses of a young Confederate cavalry officer named Seeley and an even younger Union recruit named Bauer. The voices of the different generals focus mainly on strategy, with very little personalization or internal characterization to set the voices apart--Grant is the one who smokes cigars constantly, Sherman the one with the occasional bursts of colorful language, but otherwise they spend a lot of time giving pep talks and sending out messengers on horseback.

The men from the lower ranks are a bit more interesting, both as people and in what they experience firsthand on the battlefield. Bauer's arc (if it is that) echos the kid in Red Badge of Courage (experiences first battle, runs away, comes back and fights again) but we don't ever get in his head. Seeley's sections are the most exciting to read--capturing Union spies, watching his commander charge out alone at the enemy lines--but again, we don't know much about him. The different characters from different sides never interact, and the reader never has the chance to get absorbed into their lives. Despite what Shaara claims in his forward, this book is about the battle of Shiloh first, and the soldier characters exist only as a lens for the reader to understand that battle. It's not about the characters at all.