Midway through Kevin Powers’s gorgeous, devastating second novel, one of the protagonists reflects on what he believes to be 'the truth at the heart of every story, that violence is an original form of intimacy, and always has been, and will remain so forever.' It is certainly the truth at the heart of A Shout in the Ruins ... Powers details these inhumane acts with elegance, restraint and a refreshing absence of sentimentality. His spare, meticulous sentences lend a perverse beauty to even the most brutal passages of the novel and give immediacy and emotional heft to the ordeals of its characters ... A Shout in the Ruins, as its title suggests, lays bare the tremendous suffering on which our country was founded and demands its acknowledgment. But Powers also offers love and grace in these pages, and a prayer for redemption...if we can believe that 'though the conditions of the world may be very much as permanent and endless as the land on which we work, even those conditions can be improved with every season if worked rightly.' Amen to that.

A Shout in the Ruins is intricately plotted, but not strained or gimmicky. Powers uses suspense ably; even when the reader realizes something awful is about to happen, it's difficult to stop turning the pages ... His use of language in A Shout in the Ruins — inspired, perhaps, by William Faulkner — is nothing short of brilliant, and he connects with his characters in a very real way; he explores their psyches with an uncommon sensitivity ... a singular triumph of a book.

...a lacerating and elegiac—if at times uneven—novel about the lasting effects of human bondage ... While the story grows confusing at times...the author’s writing possesses the same intimate, lyrical power as his haunting debut ... This is a fine, relevant novel from a notable author.

A Shout in the Ruins marches with a phalanx of great novels by Colson Whitehead, Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Geraldine Brooks, E.L. Doctorow, Paulette Jiles, Charles Frazier, Jeffrey Lent, Michael Shaara, Gore Vidal, Stephen Crane and so many more. Any new writer who tries to join the ranks of these authors risks tripping over their feet or, worse, being set upon by the cliches that scamper after them like mangy dogs ... Powers brings to Virginia battle scenes the same searing immediacy he brought to his stories of carnage in The Yellow Birds. Once again, we come to feel the mix of agony and absurdity suffered by soldiers caught between the tectonic plates of history ... Powers has curdled the gothic tradition into a thick paste and spread it all over these pages. Rather than highlighting the perversity of slavery, his sententious prose strains to upstage it ... That’s particularly lamentable because Powers can be such a forceful writer when he resists the temptation to substitute grandiose gestures for his own hard-won wisdom.

Mr. Frazier’s superb novel is both a large-hearted homage and a sensitive reckoning of the guilt that accrues to those who 'profited from pain in the face of history’s power to judge' ... The prose in A Shout in the Ruins gets pretty high-flown...in clunky imitation of Faulkner or the Frazier of Cold Mountain ... Elsewhere the descriptions are more potent ... Pain and emptiness are the eternal qualities of Mr. Powers’s desolate novels, whether they grapple with the Civil War or Iraq. 'Nothing changes,' he writes, 'but the names we give to things.'

Some passages in Powers’ second novel...unfold with a fable’s tragic inevitability, while specificity of setting and character, both strikingly described and original, will brand them into the reader’s consciousness ... Beautifully formed sentences express unsettling truths about humanity, yet tendrils of hope emerge.

It is a book of epic sweep, although a significant part of its achievement is to create the sense of a large scale within a tight format: it’s only 272 pages long. Another success is to handle the same themes of conflict, oppression and reconciliation as [his] first book, but to do so in such a strikingly different context as to create a strikingly different effect. It has to be said, though, that while the thematic focus is never in doubt, the narrative line in the civil war sections is sometimes too densely packed. Does Powers – who also writes poems that tend to depend on glimpses and glances rather than extrapolated stories – feel that it’s banal simply to set things fair and square before the reader? Possibly, and possibly with good reason. But the fact is that several of his characters aren’t given space to establish themselves strongly enough in our mind’s eye, and some elements of the drama feel blurred or hurried ... Powers is at his best when he contemplates scenes of inhumanity, considers questions of self-determination in a context of crisis, and weighs the lessons they teach about the need for loving-kindness ... while this means A Shout in the Ruins doesn’t have uniform intensity, it certainly confirms Powers as a significant talent.

Powers is good at writing war ... The intelligence in the new novel, however, is suffocating. Powers skips perspectives from character to character to an omniscient narrator who knows things the characters don’t, without getting too close to any one figure. Cameo players, even a postman we never see again, are offered a hearing. A panorama of voices in itself isn’t a problem, but Powers never strikes a comfortable balance, in particular between the omniscient and the personal. The result is that we’re often unsure of the origins of an observation. This matters ... It’s difficult to tell if simplicity is parading as complexity at the bidding of a character, in which case it might be forgivable, or of the author, in which case it’s not.

With poetic and nimble language that brings to mind another student of literary violence, Cormac McCarthy, Powers, 37, creates a drama with deep roots in America's struggles with race, sex and commerce. Robiou, the plantation owner Powers grew up hearing about, is now Antony Levallois, a quietly tyrannical man with the foresight to see potential riches in the upcoming railroad age. A small-time slave owner named Bob Reid stands in his way, but Reid is soon getting his body and spirit blown apart in the war as his teen daughter, Emily, waits behind. Amid this psychodrama, two slaves, Rawls and Nurse, fall in love and plot a future that might just be impossible to attain in the Old South.

In a delicately woven narrative ... The cycle of violence, Powers argues, doesn’t end with the civil war; with the victory of the Union and the abolition of slavery, one world ends and another begins, yet violence is so ingrained that it is handed down the generations ... The writing is beautiful and powerful; Powers...has a lyrical, effortless style. A Shout in the Ruins is confirmation, if it were needed, that Kevin Powers is a writer of rare talent.

With a complex structure reminiscent of Faulkner, Powers adroitly weaves his narrative threads together with subtle connections that reinforce his themes of longing for coherence and the continuing effect of the past on the present ... An impressive novel.

...inconsistent follow-up to Powers’s PEN/Hemingway Award–winning The Yellow Birds ... The reader is left with a shout that enervates more than it inspires.