Guardian

Rating:
Summary: Good story
Review: ... but then what is. Solidly written, the story moves well and is enjoyable. Haldeman begins to move back to his solid foundation established in the likes of Forever War and Mindbridge.

Rating:
Summary: An engaging read, even though it's light on the SF
Review: After panning Haldeman's "The Coming", I'm glad to be able to give a positive review of "The Guardian". Though very light on the SF, the characterizations are good and the pace is brisk.

Fair warning - the SF elements don't come in until past the half-way point. There is one section that is an intense look at speculative worlds, and the ending smacks of classic alternative history. However, you don't want to buy this book for the SF/alternative history elements, because everything included has been done elsewhere, and better. It's the seamless integration of these elements with the story and characterization that makes this a worthwhile read.

This is not a classic, and I don't expect to read it again. But I enjoyed it as a one-timer, and passed it on to another reader who also enjoyed it.

Rating:
Summary: Great book but not typical Haldeman
Review: I have not read Joe Haldeman before and if this is an example I will definitely pass the next time someone offers me one of his books. Okay, I thought the book was science fiction. I was reading it expecting a life changing first contact novel. Instead, I got a travelogue of Americana circa 1890. The first part of the book was written like a travel journal but the only character is Rosa. We only experience what she experiences even though there are other characters in the story. We do not learn very much about them. We only see what Rosa shows us, which is usually scenery. It did not take long before I was bored out of my mind.

This book was very unsatisfying. Alas, the one redeeming quality about this novel is that it is short.

Rating:
Summary: Leave this one at the beach house
Review: I have not read Joe Haldeman before and if this is an example I will definitely pass the next time someone offers me one of his books. Okay, I thought the book was science fiction. I was reading it expecting a life changing first contact novel. Instead, I got a travelogue of Americana circa 1890. The first part of the book was written like a travel journal but the only character is Rosa. We only experience what she experiences even though there are other characters in the story. We do not learn very much about them. We only see what Rosa shows us, which is usually scenery. It did not take long before I was bored out of my mind.

This book was very unsatisfying. Alas, the one redeeming quality about this novel is that it is short.

Rating:
Summary: Did Joe get bored and chang ethe story?
Review: I picked up Guardian because of the unique historical and character pov. I really liked the first 85% of the book. It was interesting to follow the Rosa and her son as they moved west and then to Alaska in the late 1800's.
But every once in a while she would hint and something that would "change everything she knew" or "change the world". They always seemed to be tacked onto the end of the chapters.
Suddenly, the end of the book throws us a twist and takes us on a short field trip across the universe. A spirit guardian takes Rosa to visit a couple of planets and what is supposedly the afterlife.
Up until then, the book was pretty interesting. The whole raven/guardian and space theme seemed to be tacked on after Haldeman lost interest in writing the original story.
I wish the sci-fi aspect was more than the last couple of chapters. So much more could have been done with this story, but Joe just ends it. There is no climax, just a very boring alternative history wrap-up.
Was it historical fiction of a fascinating episode in our nation's history? Or the first book in a fascinating sci-fi series with an 19th century schoolmarm as the heroine? It seems to be neither. Which is too bad.

Rating:
Summary: Good historical fiction; a bit thin on the science fiction
Review: It is difficult to imagine that the author of this also wrote the Forever War. Though it has been over 25 years between the two. Nonetheless, the latter is exemplary hard military science fiction. But what about this book?

Its descriptions, told in the first person, of the late nineteenth century in the United States, are wonderfully done. They span the Civil War to the Alaskan gold rush. Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. But unlike say Jack Finney's "Time and Again", there is little intrigue here. Rather, we see society through the eyes of a single woman trying to raise her son. The constraints and norms it imposes on her seem so confining to us, but she describes them matter-of-factly, which deliberately adds to the dissonance that the author intends between the subject's experiences and ours.

Read this if you want some understanding of what it meant to be female and not wealthy or powerful in that United States.

Ah, but what about the SCIENCE fiction? A little sparse. Such as it is appears only in the last quarter or less of the book. The first three quarters is straight historical fiction, though within which, the subject keeps alluding to this mysterious thing. Slightly annoying. When it finally does happen, it is rather hokey. Bloody risible, actually. I found it unconvincing and simply not up to the author's standards in his earlier books.

Rating:
Summary: Engrossing enough to prove hard to put down
Review: Readers might anticipate a story of an encounter with alien powers from the description - and might be disappointed. In reality this is the story of Rosa, a woman who escapes an abusive husband and journeys across country with her child in post-Civil War days, to make a new life for herself. While the hints of encounters with a world-changing alien lie throughout the story line, it's only in the final third of the account that any science fiction elements shine through. Guardian is still engrossing enough to prove hard to put down, despite its lack of emphasis on the alien experience itself.

Rating:
Summary: unique speculative fiction
Review: She was only a child when the civil war started but her parents were wise enough to send her up North to relatives when it looked like the south would lose. She stayed at a boarding school until she went to Wellestey College where she met and later married Edward Tolliver, a rich and powerful man. The marriage wasn't a happy one but when Rosa saw her husband sodomize their son Daniel, she knew it was time to leave.

Rosa and Daniel traveled to Dodge City where they had many happy years together until a Pinkerton agent hired by Edward arrived on the scene to take Daniel back to his father. Daniel conked the agent over the head, allowing them to escape and they decide to see if they could get rich in Alaska. While Daniel is in the field panning for gold, a drunken miner kills him and Rosa decides to kill herself until a spirit guide named Raven takes her around the universe. When Rosa returns, her actions change the course of history and save millions of lives.

Award winning author Joe Haldeman has written a very simple story about a woman's fight to survive and triumph. What is not so simple is the way the protagonist has to learn those lessons but what would defeat another person doesn't even phase Rose. She takes what she learns and applies it to her everyday life and in doing so makes the world a better place.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Interestingly-offbeat sort-of-SF novel
Review: This interestingly-offbeat sort-of-SF novel starts off as a late 19th century memoir, 'as written by' the protag-lady circa 1952. Rosa Coleman moves to Kansas to escape an abusive husband, then moves on to Alaska when the brute find out she's in Dodge City -- a town Haldeman picked, no doubt, with malice aforethought [note 1]. The 'memoir' is well-researched and pretty good, but has no special sfnal frisson until Rosa is led on a galactic fantasy-tour by an Alien Guardian disguised as a Tlingit Raven shaman... [note 2]

It wouldn't be fair to reveal how Raven got involved, so let's just say that many-worlds is the law in this universe, with interesting consequences. Haldeman's writing is as good as ever (a relief after Forever Peace), and the galactic-tourist scenes with Raven and Rosa are as thrilling and strange as the encounters with the weird continuity-guardian in The Hemingway Hoax [note 3] -- high praise indeed.

The spirit-guardian out-of-body trip leader was a pretty common conceit in 19th century proto-sf, and Haldeman specifically identifies a Flammarion novel [note 4] as a parallel work to his. A somewhat similar book, that ordinary readers may have actually read, is Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus. Personally, I would have preferred more galaxy-touring and less history in Guardian, but I wasn't disappointed with the book at hand. And, at 231 pages, no great time-committment is required. Recommended.

I glanced through the online reviews for Guardian. About a third wanted more history and less SF. Another third wanted more SF, and the rest were happy with Haldeman's chosen mix. Um, Publisher's Review panned it as "odd and unsatisfying". So YMMV.
____________
Note 1). -- town of a thousand bad cliches. Yup, she got the hell out of Dodge...
Haldeman used to live nearby, in Oklahoma (and grew up in Alaska).

Note 2). Raven has roughly the same position in Northwest Coast mythology as Coyote does in the American Southwest, or Loki in Nordic myths.

Note 3). They also make more sense than those HH scenes.

Note 4). You won't be surprised to hear that John Clute has a copy of the Flammarion in his personal library. Ah, it's Lumen, newly-translated by one B. Stableford...