There's a sometimes fascinating branch of historical fiction which deals with alternate history. It asks a basic question - what if things had turned out differently? What would the world be like? The first novel I read that does this was Fatherland by Robert Harris. That looked at what life in Germany would have been like had they won World War 2. In The Plot Against America, the question asked is what would life in the United States have been like had Roosevelt lost the 1940 presidential election to a candidate sympathetic to Nazi Germany.
The story is told from the point of view of a young Jewish child whose peaceful family and neighbourhood is ripped apart by the rising tide of anti-semitism and hysteria that gradually builds. The book does a good job of describing this and you get a real sense of a change in atmosphere during the book. However, where I believe the book did fall short was in its conclusion.
Unfortunately, this may spoil the ending of the book for anyone who hasn't read it yet so don't read on if you don't want to read spoilers.
The ending essentially involves getting the historical timeline back on track to the true history we all know. This makes this novel more a historical detour instead of a true alternative history. The events in the novel should have had repercussions that rumbled on for years. These are not mentioned and the ending is too neat for my liking. For this reason I felt this was a good read with an unsatisfactory conclusion.
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