Exciting hunting scenes and a tender love story with two well-developed characters.
This debut historical novel offers a Late Pleistocene adventure set on the land bridge connecting Siberia with North America, a huge region known as Beringia.
About 15,000 years ago, as the Ice Age nears its end, Harjo, a member of the Wind Band, has reached 16 summers in age. The intrepid mammoth hunter is ready to begin his Right of Passage journey, which will take him from his winter camp in the inland river valley to the shores of the Great Sea and the small village of his mother’s people, the Canineqmiut. He loads his sled with mammoth pelts and some red chert stone, which is prized for making strong tools, to trade for seal pelts, as the Canineqmiut (or Yupik) are sea mammal hunters. When he returns to the Wind Band, bringing proof of his successful odyssey, he will achieve adulthood. There is one more requirement of the Right of Passage. Harjo must experience a vision, a mystical revelation he can share with the Elders even if he doesn’t yet understand its meaning. The dangerous trek will change Harjo’s life profoundly: He meets and rescues Onna, a young slave girl, who will become his wife, and he single-handedly slays a charging lion. The narrative explores Harjo’s trajectory and the ecological changes beginning to take place on the Mammoth Steppe. Barnette, a field archaeologist, spent time on the Alaskan coast of the Bering Sea. As a member of Oklahoma’s Muscogee, or Creek, Nation, he is familiar with his people’s language and legends. From that base, he gives free rein to his imagination in this engaging story. In great detail, he relates the specifics of tool production, clothing, food preparation, the construction of lodging using mammoth tusks and pelts, and the cultural similarities and differences among the various Muscogee bands. While the intermittent linguistic missteps (“The every present Enemy Warriors”; “They past a large hearth”) are irritating, they are not fatal. But the frequent lengthy and overly explicit sexual passages will limit the book’s appropriateness for some readers.
Exciting hunting scenes and a tender love story with two well-developed characters.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5456-8140-4
Page Count: 646
Publisher: Mill City Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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