SEDUCING THE SPIRITS

A beautiful young ornithologist working in Panamanian wilderness finds herself drawn into the local indigenous community.

“Behave yourself. Follow their rules. And for Christ’s sake don’t do anything to piss [the Indians] off,” 25-year-old grad student scientist Jenny is told before being abandoned near a Kuna village in the coastal jungle to observe harpy eagles. Young piles on the perils confronting her tall, blonde heroine: drug runners, poisonous snakes, those oversensitive Indians, not to mention Jenny’s own frailties in the face of loneliness and fear. But this skillful, oversimplified first novel is more of a fairy story than it first appears. When danger threatens, Jenny finds herself befriended and rescued by the Kunas, who emerge as better people in every way than the white characters: the punitive boss who sends Jenny into this rudimentary exile after they have an affair; the cartoonish hellfire preacher attempting to convert the Kunas who brands Jenny a whore; the promiscuous charlatan of a scientist who set up the eagle project. The Kunas—particularly Ceferino, a healer/seer who becomes Jenny’s lover—are not only more caring but far more knowledgeable about the eagles. Jenny, an underdeveloped and oddly detached figure, endures many trials in her voyage of personal discovery before finally reaching home.

Anthropologically empathetic and soft-centered, with beguiling descriptions of the natural world entwined around two-dimensional characterizations.