Arrested Development

Take a town full of West Virginia coal miners, 17th century nobility, one of the longest and bloodiest wars in history, d'Artagnan (without the three musketeers), Blaise Pascal, Rene Decartes, Galileo, Oliver Cromwell and Gustav II Adolph. Shake well and simmer for thirteen years. Eric Flint's world of 1632 is an amazing and complex alternate history universe that split off from ours one spring day in 2000 and 1631. The Grantville Singles provide readers with the opportunity to sample some of our favorite stories from the semi-monthly magazine devoted to the series, The Grantville Gazette. We hope you enjoy them. In this story Virginia DeMarce explores the limits of the patience of priests and just what the word "gross" might mean to pre-teen boys. We discover, once again that 17th century Germans aren't 19th Century Victorians, and that time past in the past.