I felt the structure twisting to get the characters at moments of great import, and yet my emotions never rose to match the gravitas of those moments.

I really think that organizing it from the start as a family saga did the story no favors. Even when the narrative gets a degree or two out from the Henry family, there's just too much coincidence in the historical meet-ups—it's the Battle of Midway! It's the Manhattan Project! It's the Red Cross at Terezín! With a less related cast of characters, the novels might still have turned out overdesigned and unwieldy, but at least I wouldn't have lost my suspension of disbelief when we went to visit Stalin.

(At the time it was housed about three miles from where I lived, so we all knew about it.)

That's really neat.