A time-hopping tale that should appeal to readers with an interest in the prehistoric period.
This debut omnibus unites all three installments of a story that connects a pregnant woman in the late Pleistocene era with her modern-day descendant, a researcher who gets entangled in a terrorist plot.
Raven is an early human woman who is forced to join her sister’s clan after her mate dies. Her sister’s husband and clan leader, Bear, treats Raven with disdain when he is not sharing her bed. When they encounter an injured Neanderthal man—scornfully referred to as a “Longhead” by the clan—Raven uses her skills as a healer to nurse him back to health. Upon realizing she is pregnant, and that the likely father is the Longhead, not Bear, Raven flees the clan to find and hopefully join the Longheads, all the while wondering what the offspring of these two distantly related but still very different groups of people will be like: “Those heavy brows and the heavily muscled build made an unattractive combination when she struggled to imagine a female infant.” In the present day, Mark Hayek, a Parkinson’s disease researcher in whose veins runs the blood of Neanderthals thanks to a union between them and the early humans, must travel to the Levant to sort out a family inheritance. But he soon realizes that his cousin Antun may be under the sway of a terrorist group known as the Lions of the Levant and may be manipulating Mark for selfish gains. Swan is clearly heavily influenced by Jean Auel, although her writing is less explicit than that of The Clan of the Cave Bear author. Raven’s story vastly outshines that of the hapless Mark, who frequently comes off as astonishingly and annoyingly naïve. The differences between early humans and the Neanderthal Longheads should fascinate readers (At one point, Raven observes: “Stories she heard about the Longheads hadn’t prepared her to expect that the forms below would look so much like actual men. Their bodies were broader, and something was off about their arms and legs”). And the prehistoric world, filled with bison, hyenas, wolves, and two-legged predators, is portrayed in all of its harsh, hostile glory.
A time-hopping tale that should appeal to readers with an interest in the prehistoric period.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5407-8994-5
Page Count: 412
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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