Blending grand-scale storytelling with deeply provocative social and spiritual themes, Lawrence could very well be the next...
The second installment of Lawrence’s Guardians series—following his debut novel The Guardians of Time (2011)—is equal parts epic science-fiction, time-travel adventure, historical-fiction drama and apocalyptic thriller.
With nothing short of the future of civilization at stake, agents from a time-traveling anti-terrorism group must go back into the past to stop an enemy organization determined to alter history—and thus the future—for its nefarious purposes. With dual storylines set largely in 2074 Monemvasia, Greece, “the Gibraltar of the East,” and early 19th-century Greece during the country’s war for independence against the Ottoman Empire, the high octane narrative is powered by an ensemble cast of well-developed, emotionally compelling characters such as Rashid Ibn Taleb Al-Noury, a young Moroccan who has joined the ranks of the Guardians as a Paladin to try and uncover what the Trustees are plotting in 1825 Greece; John Crowe, a ruthless, charismatic Trustee operative and former Paladin; and Mark Lawson, the time traveler from the future who brought with him that which could save humanity—and potentially destroy it. Although the science-fiction element is an obviously integral part of the storyline, much of the time it takes a backseat to the saga’s historical-fiction aspect. Lawrence excels at immersing the reader in 1825 Greece through vivid, thorough description and a clear knowledge of the area, its history and culture. Fans of elite alternate history sagas like S.M. Stirling’s Island in the Sea of Time trilogy, Robert Silverberg’s Roma Eterna and Eric Flint and David Drake’s Belisarius sequence will be more than satisfied with the meticulous historical detail, adept characterization and intricate plotlines of the Guardians saga.
Blending grand-scale storytelling with deeply provocative social and spiritual themes, Lawrence could very well be the next coming of Harry Turtledove.Pub Date: May 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983172116
Page Count: 371
Publisher: Pentelicus
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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