RaveHouston ChronicleKline takes full advantage of fiction—its freedom to create compelling characters who fully illuminate monumental events to make history accessible and forever etched in our minds ... Kline tells their stories with relentless detail and tests our capacity to endure the most wretched of human conditions. We taste the inedible slop served to prisoners, smell every ounce of human waste excreted, feel the pain of whips on our flesh and, most of all, rebel at the de-humanizing condescension of one people to another ... Kline is a serious researcher and a vivid storyteller ... Kline’s prose is purposeful and urgent ... there is also hope and optimism in The Exiles and redemption, as well as many unexpected side characters ... There are good surprises and turns in the plot which I will not spoil. I developed a keen interest in all the characters and was sorry to leave them ... a tour de force of original thought, imagination and promise.
