by Michael Z. Williamson
I remember when this book was on our New Shelf and it kept catching my eye. The cover showed a military vehicle being driven across a barren landscape of rolling hills. In the background are woolly mammoths and saber-toothed predators. A woolly rhinoceros is running alongside the vehicle. Standing up in the back of the vehicle are a Roman centurion, a modern day military soldier holding an automatic weapon, but with a quiver of arrows slung over his shoulder and a Paleolithic warrior aiming a spear at the woolly rhinoceros.
I ignored this book for as long as I could, to give library patrons a chance to check it out first. After several months, I couldn't resist any longer and checked it out.
What a fantastic fantasy read! Two military Humvees, at the back of a convoy in Afghanistan, both feel their vehicles take a sharp and jolting drop .... and they find themselves alone in a barren landscape. Grasses waving in the wind, no road and most alarmingly, their convoy is nowhere in sight. The military personnel come from different backgrounds and have varying skills and knowledge. Some are survivalists, some watch a lot of adventure TV. All of them have to learn how to work together, both within their military unit and simply as human beings. Thus begins their adventure. As they rally around and try to make sense of where (when) they are, the various people handle the situation with varying degrees of success. They also discover other displaced people, and animals who have been extinct for millennia.
I found it interesting to see how each person handled the adversity of the situation they found themselves in and how the different displaced-in-time people reconstructed their various societies and how they then had to adapt and learn to work together in order to get everyone back home *when* they belonged.
This book is as much an observation of psychological exercise as it is an exploration of an ancient world paired with the clash of people with different technology, knowledge, language and beliefs. I thought the perspective and internal struggle of each individual was very well done. I would highly recommend this book!
Heidi Y.