Well, I read Ohio over the weekend, and I am now telling you, dear reader: Don't bother. The premise of the book sounds fanciful in a nice, nerdy, literary sci-fi kind of way—it's a time-traveling love story that involves Nikolai Tesla, Thomas Edison, and J.P. Morgan, the construction of New York City's subways, and a royal family that stakes a claim in Ohio—but it's really just deadly dull.
Flaming has done research into the real-life characters he has woven into the novel, but he doesn't make them characters. They just bumble through the book, excised whole from this biography or that one. The narrator of the story, an old man who spackles the novel with the most boring footnotes to ever appear in fiction, isn't at all interesting, either. There's nothing in the central mystery to entice the reader on; the only thing that will push you forward is sheer force of will.
If you'd like to read a good novel about Tesla, I'd like to direct you instead to Samantha Hunt's debut novel The Invention of Everything Else, which came out a couple of years ago. Flaming should read Hunt's novel as a crash course on how to take someone who was real and transform them into a character while still keeping the essential truth of the man. Avoid The Kingdom of Ohio at all costs; life's too short for an unexceptional debut novel.
