Thank you #Netgalley for the advance reader copy of A Mound Over Hell by Gary Morgenstein in exchange for an honest review. I am a huge baseball fan and offseasons are hard, I miss my team, the Giants. I thought a book with baseball might help. This is a futuristic, dystopian version of baseball though. Where patriotism can lead to war, where America is down to one ballpark and run by The Family. This book was a bit disturbing and kinda reminded me of Futurama.

DNF - I got about 10% through this book before the writing style and characters finally ground me to a halt. I struggled to differentiate between the characters; their voices and styles seemed to overlap so frequently that I would sometimes forget who was who during a conversation. I also had a difficult time with the author's stylistic choices - many sentences with multiple commas, Puppy's narrative voice and habit of injecting opinions into the middle of descriptions, and overall tone of the novel. The setting seems interesting, and the premise sparked my interest, but I couldn't stick with it.

You had me at dystopian baseball!! As an avid baseball fan, I was immediately intrigued by the description of this book. It took me a bit to buy in to the new America that this story takes place in, but once I did that, the plot too over and I was hooked.

Thank you to NetGalley and BHC Press for my copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

If you can accept the base premise, this is actually a really good book. Epic, dystopian and quite interesting, this was a decent, solid story. World War 3 and Islam destroyed 'western civilisation' as we know it, and baseball is outlawed, alongside social media, patriotism and the entertainment industry are outlawed. Baseball. is a critical part of the story, but not the whole story. It's about changing the world, and reminds me, a bit, of The Man in the High Castle' in many ways. It's a story of the worst man can do....and the best. And is beautifully written.

I received a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
4.5 stars.