If you hopped along with Watership Down or whooped it up with Hanta Yo, you might just go for this startling novelty item which, like a statuette of Venus de Milo with a clock in her stomach, unites the informative with a livelier art: anthropological speculations about the Ice Age illustrated by the odyssey of a remarkably sophisticated Clan of Neanderthals and their Cro-Magnon foundling, Ayla. Adopted as a child by the beetle-browed Clan of the Cave Bear after her people perish in an earthquake, Ayla looks different and is different: the frontal lobes of her brain are more developed than those of the back-brained Clan. (The Clansfolk do, however, have extraordinary memories which reach back to their own evolution.) Still, odd little Ayla is mothered by medicine woman Iza; she reveres her father-figure and mentor, Magician (Mog-ur) Creb, whose brain is the best of the Clan, mystical-memory-wise; and it is Creb who shockingly proclaims that Ayla (who has been clawed by a lion) belongs to the most powerful male totem, the Cave Lion, and is not meant to be docile and subservient. Indeed, with her "forward-thinking frontal lobes," Ayla teaches herself to hunt (forbidden to women), revealing her secret when she saves a child from a beast. And at last she is accepted as the Woman Who Hunts after surviving a "Death-Curse" (a month alone). But when abusive, angry Broud impregnates Ayla, she bears a mixed-breed child and later must leave child and Clan when Broud becomes leader. . . though the Clan is doomed and the emergence of a new human being is on its way. True, Auel's Neanderthals often have some awfully peculiar notions cooking on those back brains of theirs. And anachronisms run wild through the wilderness ("You call yourself a hunter," says the Clan leader, "You expect to control a clan when you can't even control yourself?"). But it's all written with nerveless esprite admirable scenery, swell sex, convincing artifacts and survival modese and, when clubbed on by heavy publisher advertising, this first novel (first of six in a projected early-man series) may well prove curiously primitive enough to catch on in a big way.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1980
ISBN: 0553381679
Page Count: -
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but...
A full-throttle dive into the psyche and romantic attachments of Beryl Markham—whose 1936 solo flight across the Atlantic in a two-seater prop plane (carrying emergency fuel in the extra seat) transfixed the world.
As conceived in this second historical by novelist McLain (The Paris Wife, 2011, etc.), Markham—nee Beryl Clutterbuck—is the neglected daughter of an impecunious racehorse trainer who fails to make a go at farming in British East Africa and a feckless, squeamish mother who bolts back to England with their older son. Set on her own two feet early, she is barely schooled but precociously brave and wired for physical challenges—a trait honed by her childhood companion Kibii (a lifelong friend and son of a local chief). In the Mau forest—“before Kenya was Kenya”—she finds a “heaven fitted exactly to me.” Keeping poised around large mammals (a leopard and a lion also figure significantly) is in her blood and later gains her credibility at the racecourse in Nairobi, where she becomes the youngest trainer ever licensed. Statuesque, blonde, and carrying an air of self-sufficiency—she marries, disastrously, at 16 but is granted a separation to train Lord Delamere’s bloodstock—Beryl turns heads among the cheerfully doped and dissolute Muthaiga Club set (“I don’t know what it is about Africa, but champagne is absolutely compulsory here”), charms not one but two heirs to the British crown at Baroness Karen Blixen’s soiree, and sets her cap on Blixen’s lover, Denys Fitch Hatton. She’ll have him, too, and much enjoyment derives from guessing how that script, and other intrigues, will play out in McLain’s retelling. Fittingly, McLain has Markham tell her story from an altitude of 1,800 feet: “I’m meant to do this,” she begins, “stitch my name on the sky.” Popularly regarded as “a kind of Circe” (to quote Isak Dinesen biographer Judith Thurman), the young woman McLain explores owns her mistakes (at least privately) and is more boxed in by class, gender assumptions, and self-doubt than her reputation as aviatrix, big game hunter, and femme fatale suggests.
Ernest Hemingway, who met Markham on safari two years before her Atlantic crossing, tagged her as “a high-grade bitch” but proclaimed her 1942 memoir West with the Night “bloody wonderful.” Readers might even say the same of McLain’s sparkling prose and sympathetic reimagining.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53418-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PROFILES
A mother and her child-prodigy daughter struggle to survive the Holocaust by telling stories and remembering the power of...
Rosner’s debut novel is a World War II story with a Room-like twist, one that also deftly examines the ways in which art and imagination can sustain us.
Five-year-old Shira is a prodigy. She hears entire musical passages in her head, which “take shape and pulse through her, quiet at first, then building in intensity and growing louder.” But making sounds is something Shira is not permitted to do. She and her mother, Róża, are Jews who are hiding in a barn in German-occupied Poland. Soldiers have shot Róża’s husband and dragged her parents away, and after a narrow escape, mother and daughter cower in a hayloft day and night, relying on the farmer and his wife to keep them safe from neighbors and passing patrols. The wife sneaks Shira outside for fresh air; the husband visits Róża late at night in the hayloft to exact his price. To keep Shira occupied and quiet the rest of the time, Róża spins tales of a little girl and a yellow bird in an enchanted but silent garden menaced by giants; only the bird is allowed to sing. But when Róża is offered a chance to hide Shira in an orphanage, she must weigh her daughter’s safety against her desire to keep the girl close. Rosner builds the tension as the novel progresses, wisely moving the action out of the barn before the premise grows tired or repetitive. This is a Holocaust novel, but it’s also an effective work of suspense, and Rosner’s understanding of how art plays a role in our lives, even at the worst of times, is impressive.
A mother and her child-prodigy daughter struggle to survive the Holocaust by telling stories and remembering the power of music.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17977-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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