The Lazarus Taxa, by Lindsey Kinsella

Characters

Of the characters involved, the following four gave off the strongest impressions to me; Mr Richard Mansa, Sidney Starley, Doctor Kiara, and palaeontologist Dian.

Firstly, let’s look at Mr Richard Mansa, owner of the company Genesis. As a very successful and famous man with his own commercial empire, he was – as one might expect – a man who expects to get whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Mr Mansa was an older man who still possessed a strong aura of authority. It was plain to see that he was ambitious, seeking to profit from ‘time tourism’, as it were. Over the course of the story, we see just how shady and deceptive he truly is, with chapters from his past emphasizing these negative traits. As a result, I never warmed to his character.

Secondly, we come to Sidney Starley (Aka: Sid), who has worked hard to become a sound engineer and explorer. He proved to be highly ambitious, seeking to do things no-one-else has ever done before. He is soon recruited to join a scientific expedition with Richard Mansa’s team (to Colarado, in the Cretaceous Period- tens of millions of years in the past), to be their new ‘field engineer.’ Despite his skill at exploring remote locations, Sid proved to be a bit reckless at times. He always felt the need to prove himself to others, to all the people who said he’d never amount to anything. Deep down, Sid has always felt like a disappointment to others, suffering from dyslexia. It was easy to relate to Sid on these points and I truly felt for his character’s constant need to try and prove his worth, something which constantly eats away at your sense of self, never letting up.

Next, we come to Doctor Kiara Maxwell, a very smart and logical woman, who has a troubling history of agoraphobia. She is a core part of the Genesis team, having a knack for analysing situations, to come up with novel solutions to company problems. She proved to be a truly selfless woman in the end, as shown by her final act in the story, which saved the lives of countless others.

Finally, we come to Dian, a noted palaeontologist working for Genesis. It was immediately evident that she had her own way of doing things and was full of a childlike curiosity and sense of wonder. There was a sense of purity about her and her intentions: she never wished to do harm to any creature, human or otherwise. All she was interested in was studying a fascinating past time period and learning all she could about it. She made for a highly adventurous character, taking risks wherever she could, in order to see more of the Cretaceous Period and its lizard-like inhabitants. She also proved to be highly intelligent and analytically-minded, picking apart scientific data with ease, in order to understand the past world around them.