I do love fiction set in ice age periods surrounding prehistoric animals and of course the hunter-gatherers of back then, so I borrowed a books of this type from my library. Unfortunately, none of the three I borrowed turned out to be particularly good. Ah well, I'm reviewing some of them anyways. Spoilers ahead.
We follow Myrna, a young woman in her tribe who is just living her life with her sister, mother, father and wise grandmother. While her more spirited sister Berna seems to be walking the life of a future hunter, something which is uncommon for women, more shy Myrna is taught how to heal. But not all tribes agree with the more progressive ways of Myrna's tribe.
Honestly, this book is like...a blur. It was not written in an interesting way and I don't think any of the characters had much meaningful character development. There's little to no plot, it's mostly just cavemen doing cavemen things. Even the back cover text doesn't tell us anything about the plot or characters. I guess it was cool to read about these ice age-time humans living in what would eventually become the Netherlands and Belgium, but since that's still thousands of years away it doesn't do much for me.
The book also suffered from a lot of tell vs show. A lot of things were just told to the reader, which was horribly annoying since it took me out of the story. It's not that the things (usually stuff like world-building or backstories) were uninteresting, but the dry way of delivering it through narration by the all-knowing narrator (or occasionally another character) is just the cheapest and laziest way out. Show us these things, don't tell us.
There was also like, a very minor part in the story where the all-knowing narrator seemed to imply that Myrna is less beautiful than Berna just because she has a dark skin, eyes and hair color. Which is like, yaknow, not great, to put things mildly. It's not directly stated, but the way in which it is brought to the reader it does come across like this. And there's also of course some racism against Neanderthals, but apparently that's not enough and we also need to put down Myrna just because she's dark-skinned. Yikes, man. I'm not calling the author directly racist because I don't think it was what he meant to imply by what was written, but the narration does imply this a bit. It'd also be one thing if it was a character in the book being racist against her, but this directly was just the all-knowing narrator. So not exactly a great look.
Overall I considered this book a boring slog to get through. The characters were okay but not super interesting, the constant breaking of the "show, don't tell"-rule was very jarring and I never felt emotionally invested in the story. It's not the worst, but I'd still give this one a pass if I were you.
PS: I really think it should be illegal to put a wolf on the cover of a book that contains little to no wolves. Literally, why is there a wolf on there? The species is brought up about three times in passing but they serve little to no role in the story. I was disappointed by this, because the wolf on the cover seemed to imply that this book was going to touch on the species more, or maybe the domestication of wolves into dogs. Sad.
Rating: 2/5
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