Review of The Lost Years of Billy Battles

[Eileen Aycardo]

[Following is a volunteer review of "The Lost Years of Billy Battles" by Ronald E. Yates.]

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4 out of 4 stars

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‘Somebody once said the tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.’ The book The Lost Years of Billy Battles started in Billy’s fifties already and yet the story is just as captivating, enchanting and full of adventure and proved right that it is indeed better to start late than never starting to live at all. The story is set in the early 1900s and revolved around the life of Billy Battles as a writer, a soldier, a husband, a father and a grandfather.

It takes the reader through his life in the middle of war, turmoil, captivation as he try to bury the past that continues to haunt him and his family and it also retells stories of life and love in between as he lived through loving three women in his life and ultimately losing them.

It revolves around the life in the army, during the battle, through gunfights, intense conversations and confrontations and life reflections of a man who lived his life well as he tried to. As he lost his first wife, he got lost in sorrow and left to search for the meaning of life elsewhere leaving his child to his mother. He was able to find meaning when he met Katharina, his second wife but also lost her when a rival from the past came back to collect his dues. He blamed himself for it. He then decided Asia was the place to forget but fate deemed for him to fall in love for the third time and even be a father at sixty – nine.

I am giving this book four out of four stars . Yates retold his grandfather’s story well and connected the stories from Veracruz, Mexico, Philippines and other places really well that it does not confuse readers of the sequence of the stories. He was able to introduce the characters and their own stories clearly. It is also well – written and has no grammatical errors. It does include lines in several languages such as German, French and Spanish which are italicized which makes them easier to recognize when reading.

Someone who loves history and wants to know how life was during the early 1900s will love this book. As it is a story that involves war and military,profanity is found throughout the book, also bloody scenes, gunfights which might be too much for readers who have vivid imagination. It offers a good mixture of history, romance, action and humor. It is also quite a long story, but a very good one that you’d wish it was a movie.

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The Lost Years of Billy Battles
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