Staff Reviews & Reader’s Guides
Recent Reviews:
Seth Baumgartner's Love Manifesto
Rating:
A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
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American Gods
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This Time Together: Laughter and Reflection by Carol Burnett
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Losing Julia
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The Fourth Realm Trilogy by John Twelve Hawks
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An otherworldly trilogy...
Author John Twelve Hawks’ three existing novels comprise The Fourth Realm Trilogy, and consist of The Traveler (or Traveller) published in 2005, The Dark River, published in 2007, and, released just this fall, The Golden City : A Novel. The story line of each work contains varied enough elements to be part thriller, part sci-fi/fantasy, and part political and societal critique. All are wonderfully easy to read with appealing, fully described, recurring main characters, settings in New York, Los Angeles, and London one can imagine oneself inhabiting, gripping subplots, and thought provoking themes. I have very much enjoyed reading each novel, and hope that John Twelve Hawks will continue to write The trilogy’s main protagonists are Gabriel and Michael Corrigan, brothers who are the last known Travelers, existing in parallel universes, and juxtaposed on opposite sides of a war to control the world. Gabriel is a Free Runner, whose group fights to protect individual freedoms from the surveilling communications technology increasingly omnipresent in everyone’s life. Evil Michael is a member of The Brethren (or Tabula) which, though this same computer surveillance, seeks to establish a system of control over the entire world. Discussed or implied as recurring themes are family relationships, new technology, the politics of fear, and as the author indicates in his digital essay, “How We Live Now,” the price one may pay (freedoms of) for freedoms from . . . Also I found very interesting and highly intriguing that little is known about John Twelve Hawks personally beyond his pen-name (it is said that only his editor at Random House knows who he is), and that he really does live off the grid, guarding his privacy closely. Wikipedia has some information and directed links, and here is his website: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/johntwelvehawks/ The library and consortium own numerous copies of each novel. I would recommend reading the The Fourth Realm Trilogy in its entirety, beginning with Book 1, and give it 5 Stars!
