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topdragon's review against another edition
2.0
This novel depicts a tribe of ancients (Homo Erectus) in Africa, in a village called Kura. It is a matriarchal society where the protagonist, a daughter in line to become leader someday, must chose a mate and deal with the resulting consequences for her and her village.
On the positive side, this novel is not just about survival. It looks at some less concrete concepts as well, including conflicting outlooks based on how one is raised, and also humanity's first thoughts of the concept of religion. Even in those days, the author suggests, differing viewpoints on religion could be the source of banishment, strife, and even war-like behavior.
Unfortunately though, this is no "Clan of the Cave Bear". I found the beginning of the book to be a bit slow to get started. The setting was fine, the writing style was fine, and the plot seemed to be shaping up fine, but somehow, I was not captivated. I think it was mostly due to the characterization which was lacking and that, for me, is a hard problem to get past. I'd really hoped the author's knowledge of ancient societies would come into play here as we see the culture that she described but her message in the afterward makes it clear we don't know enough about them so this is all speculation.
As the novel progresses, the plot picks up and we get to experience the inevitable conflicts of interactions from other tribes/groups and their potentially conflicting approaches to the best way to do things. Unfortunately the plot itself is somewhat thin and unbalanced. The author's word choice is good but she falls prey to some rookie mistakes with storytelling. For example we get to read page after page of the "berry picking" aspects of day-to-day life but only two paragraphs devoted to a personal tragedy that happens to the main character.
I read in the author's afterward that Ms Austin choose to describe very little of the physical nature of her characters for fear that future scientists might discover something that contradicts what she wrote. What? Perhaps Ms Austin has never read any science fiction but there is a whole genre of successful storytelling that may well one day be disproven. That doesn't make the story itself bad in any way. We all appreciate accurate historical facts in our fiction reading but at the end of the day, a successful novel is a great story, not about what fact therein may or may not be proven inaccurate in the future.
Another example: the author chose to have her characters sign to each other rather than speak since we may someday discover that their voice boxes were not fully developed yet. And yet we readers still "see" what they sign because the words are in quotation marks. Their "speech" is not simple and even includes complex concepts...just like most novels. Their sign language would have to have been as robust as today's signing but how do we know they had the mental acuity to sign such concept thoughts? I'm being a bit facetious here but it seems difficult to reconcile when the author chooses when to use that particular excuse and when to ignore it.
One more gripe: the characters' names are sounds that they could make while signing, such as "Snap", "Whistle," "Hum", etc. Talk about a way to severely hamper your story-telling ability! There are quite a few characters in this book and it was impossible to keep them all straight. They are not described in any way other than their name and gender and I often forgot which gender they were; i.e. what gender would you say "Rattle" is? We never find out how they dressed, how tall they are, or what they look like. All of this led me to really not caring what happened to them and thus a promising story became merely mediocre.
On the positive side, this novel is not just about survival. It looks at some less concrete concepts as well, including conflicting outlooks based on how one is raised, and also humanity's first thoughts of the concept of religion. Even in those days, the author suggests, differing viewpoints on religion could be the source of banishment, strife, and even war-like behavior.
Unfortunately though, this is no "Clan of the Cave Bear". I found the beginning of the book to be a bit slow to get started. The setting was fine, the writing style was fine, and the plot seemed to be shaping up fine, but somehow, I was not captivated. I think it was mostly due to the characterization which was lacking and that, for me, is a hard problem to get past. I'd really hoped the author's knowledge of ancient societies would come into play here as we see the culture that she described but her message in the afterward makes it clear we don't know enough about them so this is all speculation.
As the novel progresses, the plot picks up and we get to experience the inevitable conflicts of interactions from other tribes/groups and their potentially conflicting approaches to the best way to do things. Unfortunately the plot itself is somewhat thin and unbalanced. The author's word choice is good but she falls prey to some rookie mistakes with storytelling. For example we get to read page after page of the "berry picking" aspects of day-to-day life but only two paragraphs devoted to a personal tragedy that happens to the main character.
I read in the author's afterward that Ms Austin choose to describe very little of the physical nature of her characters for fear that future scientists might discover something that contradicts what she wrote. What? Perhaps Ms Austin has never read any science fiction but there is a whole genre of successful storytelling that may well one day be disproven. That doesn't make the story itself bad in any way. We all appreciate accurate historical facts in our fiction reading but at the end of the day, a successful novel is a great story, not about what fact therein may or may not be proven inaccurate in the future.
Another example: the author chose to have her characters sign to each other rather than speak since we may someday discover that their voice boxes were not fully developed yet. And yet we readers still "see" what they sign because the words are in quotation marks. Their "speech" is not simple and even includes complex concepts...just like most novels. Their sign language would have to have been as robust as today's signing but how do we know they had the mental acuity to sign such concept thoughts? I'm being a bit facetious here but it seems difficult to reconcile when the author chooses when to use that particular excuse and when to ignore it.
One more gripe: the characters' names are sounds that they could make while signing, such as "Snap", "Whistle," "Hum", etc. Talk about a way to severely hamper your story-telling ability! There are quite a few characters in this book and it was impossible to keep them all straight. They are not described in any way other than their name and gender and I often forgot which gender they were; i.e. what gender would you say "Rattle" is? We never find out how they dressed, how tall they are, or what they look like. All of this led me to really not caring what happened to them and thus a promising story became merely mediocre.
sunshinegal's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed the book. It was interesting to think about what people may have been like a million years ago- how they communicated and lived. I thought that the characters were interesting and developed enough to keep me reading. When I first finished I was angry that Bupoto was not killed. I was wondering why they didn't try to get the truth about Snap out of him when Ash and the others saw him. Now that there's going to be a second book, it might play into that one...
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