Forge offers many realistic portrayals of the Revolutionary War, both in terms of richly researched historical specificity, and artful and terrifying descriptions of the grim, violent horrors of war itself.

Nearly the entirety of Part II of the novel is dedicated to the slow, arduous construction of the Colonial encampment at Valley Forge. Narrated through Curzon’s point of view, we are given descriptions not only of the planning of Washington’s fabled huts, but also their tedious and agonizing construction. We experience the chaos of being an untrained boy forced to construct shelter while winter crashes in. We feel the weight of the fallen trees, the exhaustion of building shelter, the cold and the hunger, and the sorry lengths to which our ancestors went in order to feed themselves, most notablythe actual process of cooking and eating firecake.

For a period of American history often lost amid the clouds of our own mythmaking, Forge provides an unflinching view of what life at that time might really have felt like, not only in terms of the campbut also the genuine horror of warfare. Eben’s showdown with the redcoat in the early moments of Part I ends with the redcoat shot through the gut, and dying in slow, wrenching agony.