Damien Ober has in interesting take on presenting American history by proposing how it would have worked out if there was a network of connected devices like our present-day internet. All the famous folks were out on the net, espousing their views. The concept is interesting and entertaining for a while, but I found it lacking in staying power. The writing was fine, but I kept losing interest and putting the title down. I guess this rewrite of American history was not my cup of tea.

3.5 stars. This is the first book by the author that I have read so I wasn't sure what to expect. What I found was a a mix of historical fiction and SciFi. This book is a standalone. There is some violence

The book blurb adequately describes the storyline so I'm not going to repeat that all of that info here. The book is set in chronological order by the date the Signers of the Declaration of Independence died. At first it was quite confusing to read because they had The Cloud, laptops, smart phones, and the internet. Yet they rode horses and didn’t have other modern technology. If you like history and SciFi, then you will probably like this book.

After an interesting beginning, this turned into a well-written alternative history by numbers in which the signatories of the Declaration of Independence are eliminated one by one via computer-generated alterations in reality. I enjoyed the writing, but, almost by necessity, the plotting became predictable and mechanical. A strange book, with an interesting premise - the conflation of 21st century technologies with the American Revolution - but ultimately unsatisfying.

I love the idea behind the plot of this book - American Revolution with internet. It’s an ingenious idea. However, I had difficulty engaging in the story. I’m sure die-hard science fiction fans will be pulled in by the well-written story.

This is clearly a high-concept alternative history title, but I would suggest it is a bit too "high concept". The premise is simple: What if the Founding Fathers had the Internet? What would their dying days look like? While the anachronistic element of the book is its hook, I'm not sure that it's an effective one. I would rather have had the Founders battling online and in person in real time from, say, 1775 to 1787, with an epilogue in 1826 and the dueling deaths of Jefferson and Adams. In our current Age of Trump, that would a most relevant, and likely compelling, narrative.

The premise of the book is very interesting...if we'd had social media and all this technology back during the Founding Fathers' time, what would it have looked like? But I got lost in the sea of unfamiliar technology, and had a difficult time following the dialogue at times. For the avid sci-fi reader, who also digs history, this would be right up their ally. While I'm a big history fan, I'm not-so-much for the sci-fi, and that's where it lost me. Interesting idea though...