Remember Ayla, the Cro-Magnon orphan who was raised by a tribe of less-evolved Neanderthals in Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)? Well, now, having been cursed and exiled by new tribe leader Broud (who raped her), Ayla must abandon baby Durc and go searching for her own species ("The Others"). So off she goes to the Eurasian North—on foot and alone. . . until she reaches the Valley of the Horses, finding "a nice cave" where she can settle in for the winter. And about half of this novel (#2 in Auel's Earth's Children series) details Ayla's self-help progress in the wild: she refines her already-impressive hunting and nursing abilities; she nurtures a foal ("Whinney"), discovers a neat trick called horseback-riding, invents the travois; she accidentally learns how to make Cure via stone-sparking; she mothers a baby lion ("Baby"), she becomes the world's first female to braid her hair; and she frets about the whole matter of mating—which, despite her past experiences, she doesn't quite understand. Meanwhile, however, in alternating chapters, Ayla's obviously-destined Super-Mate is on his way. This is big blond Jondalar of the Zelandonii, who reluctantly sets out on a Journey with young, impetuous brother Thonolan: they follow the "Great Mother River" (they're from an advanced, Mother-worshipping clan that scorns the Neanderthal "flatheads" as "animals"); along the way, Jondalar helps a friendly clan with his special expertise at deflowering virgins (" 'Jondalar man, Noria woman,' he said huskily. . ."); when Thonolan is wounded by a rhino, they're taken in by the Sharamudoi, a hunting/fishing/boating tribe that Thonolan eventually marries into; but, after Thonolan's wife and child die, the brothers travel on again. Eventually, then, they reach the Valley of the Horses—where Thonolan is promptly killed by Baby (who's no baby anymore). . . while Jondalar, seriously wounded, is nursed back to health by Ayla. Will these two find mating magic? Of course. But first Jondalar must teach culturally deprived Ayla how to speak—and must overcome his revulsion when he learns that Ayla is the mother of a half-flathead. (His anti-flathead outburst brings out the Barbara Stanwyck in a now-articulate Ayla: "If I could make a choice between human and animal, I'd take the stinking hyenas!") So finally, quarrels resolved, Ayla is introduced to Jondalar-style mating, oral sex is invented ("Oh, woman! . . . How did you learn to do that!"), and Ayla gets ready to join semi-civilization. As before, Auel's dialogue is often hiloriously anachronistic, suggesting a Saturday Night Live cave-man sketch. And Ayla's sugary chats with Whinney and Baby are on the icky-juvenile level. But, though this has less tribal texture than Cave Bear, the anthropological details and the hard-core sex again make an earthy combination—so Ayla followers can probably be expected to return for more Stone Age action.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1982
ISBN: 0553381660
Page Count: -
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Gentle, soft-spoken, and full of wisdom.
A wise and witty cat and his gentle master share an indomitable spirit that helps them survive and thrive in any situation in this Japanese bestseller.
The white cat with the crooked tail is happy with life as a stray. He is just fine without humans, thank you very much. But when a car hits him, breaking his leg, he thinks of the kind man who leaves him food and lets him sleep on the hood of his van. Satoru Miyawaki welcomes the stray that shows up at his door and nurses him back to health. He names the cat Nana, the Japanese word for the numeral seven, the shape of the cat’s crooked tale. Nana and Satoru form a bond of love and loyalty that grows deeper over the five-plus years they share their lives. So it’s a surprise when Satoru embarks on a road trip across Japan with Nana in an attempt to find a new home for the cat with childhood friends. The reason for the journey is revealed later, and we also learn details of Satoru’s life through conversations with his friends and Nana’s smart-alecky commentary. Despite its seeming simplicity, the novel contains surprising depth. Arikawa artfully portrays Nana’s “catness,” from the subtle flick of an ear to a lashing tail. He pairs Nana with the gentle soul of Satoru, who has learned to allow the trials of life to strengthen him and polish his spirit. And he leads readers to see what Satoru learned and Nana already knew: that the key to a well-lived life is acceptance.
Gentle, soft-spoken, and full of wisdom.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-49133-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
VanderMeer is a master of literary science fiction, and this may be his best book yet.
VanderMeer (The Strange Bird, 2018, etc.) continues his saga of biotech gone awry and the fearsome world that ensues.
David Bowie had just one dead astronaut, poor Maj. Tom, in his quiver. VanderMeer puts three in the middle of a strange city somewhere on what appears to be a future Earth, a place where foxes read minds and ducks threaten their interlocutors: “I’ll kill you and feast on your entrails,” one duck says, and, on being challenged about his lab-engendered ducky identity, spits back, “You are not a whatever you are.” All very true. In the ruin of the world that the nefarious Company has left behind after its biotech experiments went south, such things are commonplace, and nothing is quite as it seems, although everything dies. Sometimes, indeed, everything dies even as it lives, which explains why those three astronauts, a nicely balanced blend of ethnicities and genders, are able to walk and talk even as their less fortunate iterations lie inert. Says one, Chen, of his semblable, “Keep him alive. He might have value,” an easy task given that one version of Chen has been blown “into salamanders,” as our duck can attest. Other creatures that flow out of the Company’s still-clanking biotech factory have similar fates: They are fodder for the leviathan that awaits in the holding pond outside, for the behemoth that stalks the land. “Bewildered by their own killing,” muses Grayson, one of the three. “Bewildered by so many things. To be dead without ever having lived." Much of the action in VanderMeer’s story is circumstantial, but it provides useful backstory to his previous books Borne and The Strange Bird, delivering, for example, the origin story of the blue fox and emphasizing the madness of a humankind that destroys the natural world only to replace it with things very like what has been destroyed. Or at least that’s their intention, creating instead a hell paved with the results of mad, bad science.
VanderMeer is a master of literary science fiction, and this may be his best book yet.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-27680-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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