1 out of 4 stars
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Kennedy’s Revenge: The Election of 2016 by Stephen L. Rodenbeck is a historical novel blended with non-fiction history. Each odd chapter contains fiction, while each even chapter is supposedly a history lesson, and the two parallel narratives are intended to weave together to allow the reader a complete picture of the author’s arguments about history. The historical novel centres around the protagonist, Fitzgerald “Fitz” Cavendish, who stumbles upon information after the death of his grandmother that causes him to run for the presidency in 2016 and will, in his words, “alter the course of history.”
There is a saying attributed to Anton Chekhov that the author would do well to follow in the fiction chapters: “don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” The writing is pretty hard-going for the reader; there’s a lot of simply being told that things happen, rather than being immersed in the narrative. The writing does improve towards the end of the book, with the writer engaging the reader with more dialogue, but you’ve got to get there first! There isn’t a lot of flow to the prose, and Rodenbeck often resorts to ‘dumping’ large amounts of information on his reader that makes it difficult to pick out the important details - why does the reader need to know every brand of clothing Fitz wears, for example? Rodenbeck also relies on a lot of quite tired tropes to progress his story.
The ‘history’ in the even numbered chapters is entirely conspiracy theory, and doesn’t do much to make it particularly convincing. The Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Rothschilds, Big Pharma, Jewish bankers, the Titanic, JP Morgan, 9/11, etc. - all the typical conspiracies make an appearance. Rodenbeck has a real tendency to simply state things as fact without providing evidence or reference to support his theories; bizarrely, you’re given every detail, no matter how small, in the fiction chapters, while the non-fiction remains remarkably evidence-light. Even with the author stating in the introduction that unless stated that it’s allegation or conspiracy, everything in the book is true, the reader still needs references - particularly for quotations - to make these theories believable. The author does say that sources are available upon request, but this seems like asking the reader to go an unnecessary extra mile.
The premise of this book is great - the illegitimate son of one of America’s favourite presidents on a mission to expose a global conspiracy - but the delivery is poor. Add onto that typos (like spelling Hillary Clinton’s name wrong!) and grammatical errors, coupled with a pretty predictable plot line, and this book is hard work. At times, I was giving myself mental points for being able to guess correctly what was going to happen next! Kennedy’s Revenge: The Election of 2016 reads like a first draft that needs to go back to editors.
Overall, I have awarded this book one out of four stars. I can’t give it more because I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. This isn’t a history book so much as a collection of conspiracy theories, with some decidedly-average fiction thrown in. If conspiracy is your thing, then there are plenty of other books that will satisfy you, whilst being much better written. I’m an avid lover of ‘alternative histories', no matter how wacky, but this book fails to live up to expectation.
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Kennedy's Revenge
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