What do you think?
Rate this book
The Sea Kings #1
The Sea Kings: The Prophecy
A novel of ancient Crete, set in 1730 B.C. Tanuati, a young Cretan trader, gets himself into sufficient trouble with pirates, slavers, and the gods that he must move around the eastern Mediterranean in seeking solutions.
289 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
32 people want to read
About the author
Les Cole
15 booksLes Cole's stories have been published since 1954. He is the author of THE SEA KINGS: The Prophecy and LION AT SEA: The Prophecy Continues, the first two volumes in this series. He majored in geology and has a strong background in Aegean archaeology and the American Civil War. He has worked as a chemist, a technical writer, and a technical copywriter who was fired from the major ad agencies in Los Angeles. A dog lover, he lives in Ventura, California, with his wife and cat.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 9, 2021
One of the worst books I've ever read. What more can I say? The author is NOT a born writer but worse, there is NO atmosphere whatsoever in a book that COULD HAVE BEEN loaded with it. Picture yourself in a distant time and what could have been an evocative story cast partly in the shadows of figures and objects cast on walls by torches - of mysterious palace intrigues and the even more mysterious possibility of the Minoan Knossos as a center of it all and you would have had - well, at least something interesting. And what do we have: a juvenile story of a young man setting out in the world, more sexploits that exploits in which he is robbed, enslaved, and you name it all without any real atmosphere to heighten the interest and give the reader a sense of what it might be like to live in those ancient times. That was what I was hoping for and was so bitterly disappointed. So long Les, but count me out on any more of your obviously geared-for-teenage ramblings.
June 26, 2011
This entry is misleading. It indicates that I started reading on 24 June, 2011, and finished two days later. Nope. truth is I started reading this book nearly ten years ago, struggled half-way through it and then shelved it in some frustration. Last month I rediscovered ancient age-of-sail historical fiction and thought I just might finish off The Sea Kings. I did and I am very glad for it.
Les Cole has written something very special. In describing the settings (in which he is an absolute master) and action and characters of this Bronze Age epic, it seems to me that he has tried to do so using the limited language of the time. A reviewer of this work on its Amazon site called Cole's writing "puerile". (read the review--it's the first one star review on the site) What the reviewer says is largely correct, but what I found absolutely marvelous about this book is that Tanuati comes to us from the second millennium BC and talks to us in his language, not ours.
I remember thinking way back when that I wasn't going to pursue this series. Come payday, I'm getting The Sea Peoples: The Prophecy Resolved. I hope it doesn't take me ten years to read it, too!
Les Cole has written something very special. In describing the settings (in which he is an absolute master) and action and characters of this Bronze Age epic, it seems to me that he has tried to do so using the limited language of the time. A reviewer of this work on its Amazon site called Cole's writing "puerile". (read the review--it's the first one star review on the site) What the reviewer says is largely correct, but what I found absolutely marvelous about this book is that Tanuati comes to us from the second millennium BC and talks to us in his language, not ours.
I remember thinking way back when that I wasn't going to pursue this series. Come payday, I'm getting The Sea Peoples: The Prophecy Resolved. I hope it doesn't take me ten years to read it, too!
July 28, 2009
Just picked this up from my favorite used bookstore, Capital Hill Books (the kind of place where the books are stacked so high they threaten to crash down and crush the patrons).
Still reading it, but finding it pleasant if the prose is a little stilted (why is it that citizens of ancient cities always have to talk like cave-people or bad Shakespearean actors?). I don't know anything about ancient Crete, so there's a whole new ancient civilization to discover (there was more to the ancient world than the greeks and romans, after all)
Finished. Got much better towards the end. Very exciting, and I kind of want to read the others...
Still reading it, but finding it pleasant if the prose is a little stilted (why is it that citizens of ancient cities always have to talk like cave-people or bad Shakespearean actors?). I don't know anything about ancient Crete, so there's a whole new ancient civilization to discover (there was more to the ancient world than the greeks and romans, after all)
Finished. Got much better towards the end. Very exciting, and I kind of want to read the others...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews