2 out of 4 stars
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The Lost Years of Billy Battles by Ronald E. Yates follows William Battles, a journalist, from 1914 to the 1930s as he travels to Mexico while undercover, fighting against forces ranging from Mexican revolutionaries to German forces. This is the third and final book of the Finding Billy Battles trilogy, but since I haven't read the other books in the series, I can only speak to its effectiveness as a standalone novel.
Unfortunately, The Lost Years of Billy Battles tries to pack in so many different elements that, at times, it becomes rather incoherent. Characters are introduced and implied to be important, such as the navigator Ruppert, and then hardly mentioned again after Billy moves on to a different adventure. The book is meant to be a fictional journal that Billy Battles left to his grandson, so I'll grant that this is faithful to how people generally write journals. However, it really didn't make for a compelling narrative; watching characters' relationships develop and change is a crucial part of fiction.
The book's writing style also proved to be distracting. Characters would speak in Spanish or German, only to have someone repeat back to them exactly what they said in English, solely for the benefit of the reader. Furthermore, even with my limited knowledge of Spanish, I was able to detect at least two errors, making it seem likely there were some issues with the German as well. There are other errors scattered throughout the book; while they weren't incredibly obvious, mixing up homonyms or misplacing a quotation mark is still off-putting when it occurs.
Despite these flaws, I can't bring myself to call The Lost Years of Billy Battles a terrible book. At one point, Billy loses someone close to him, and his grief feels realistic and raw. There are other emotional moments that shine through, and though the action scenes focus heavily on describing guns and other weapons, many were quite engaging. I usually had no idea what Billy was feeling, though, and this really hurt how engaged I was with the book. The scenes when Billy described his emotions were some of the most poignant bits of writing I've ever seen, so I certainly can't deny that the book has its moments. They're just so inconsistent that they weren't enough to push it above average, in my opinion.
Ultimately, I rate The Lost Years of Billy Battles 2 out of 4 stars. Neither the plot nor characters were consistently gripping, though there were some excellent moments that shone through. People interested in the Mexican revolution of 1910-1920 are likely to be annoyed at some of the extraneous events, such as Billy's travels to Manila and Chicago. I wouldn't recommend it for fans of historical fiction in general, and there's enough mention of sexual themes that it's for mature audiences only. I can, however, see readers enamored with historical fiction novels that are written in the format of a journal enjoying this book. If that style is something you appreciate, this is probably worth a read.
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The Lost Years of Billy Battles
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