Dreams of Eagles by William W. Johnstone
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Anyone seeing the other reviews here will think I was reading a whole other book. I just found this Johnstone Clan entry to be strung together stories between a linear set of historical happenings. The stories all remind me of stories in many other Johnstone novels. I’ve recognized a repetition of stories before, but, at least, some had some differences. This entire book is full of yet to be written Johnstone books. I had to check my Goodreads list twice to be sure I hadn’t read this before.

That even might be OK if the stories were good. But these stories have little complexity as earlier Johnstone Mountain Man stories or the recent Flintlock series. It’s just a prolonged Mountain Man book over 400 pages of the same story over and over and over again. Good editing would’ve solved this.

How about presenting the offspring of the main character as something other than a carbon copy of the father. It’s actually written blatantly that they are carbon copies! Not all are carbon copies. But those that are not carbon copies are barely heard from again.

There are hints of adding layers to the book involving a couple of young people who have a secret that gets revealed the hard way. (I know I’ve read this also in another Johnstone book). But this thread is in sharp contrast to the rest of the book and, thus, making it a clunky, out of place addition.

To me, this book is the product of scattered ideas on a table that got badly stitched together to create this volume.

Bottom line: i don’t recommend this book. 4 out of 10 points.

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