If you know me, you know I like reading prehistoric fiction, even if not all of it is good. Here's another one that interested me when I found it. Spoilers ahead.
Torka is a prehistoric hunter of his tribe. But when a giant mammoth wipes out nearly his entire people, he is left alone together with a few other survivors; his grandfather Umak, the young woman Lonit and a dog who happens to have bonded with Umak. Together they decide to travel east in hopes of finding a new, better life, but their journey is full of dangers, in particular when they come across another tribe led by a man named Galeena.
Overall I have...mixed thoughts on this book. There's some aspects I thought were really good...and some which I thought did not work at all. Let's first have a look at the negatives before getting to the positives.
My main gripe with this book is really Galeena and his tribe. They're basically the villains in this book, which doesn't have to be bad, but they're so over-the-top cartoon levels of evil that it's hard to take them seriously. They're dirty, they're gross, they're perverse, they kill too many animals and waste their corpses, they don't allow babies to live and, yes, they're even cannibals. And all of this is played up so extreme that it's just very hard to take it seriously in this otherwise rather serious and mature book.
I do appreciate that there's at least some nuance in one or two of Galeena's tribesmen who are not irredeemable characters (there's like...three who are actually decent or at least not morally totally reprehensible people), but that doesn't change the fact that Galeena and the other villains are just way too over the top to be taken seriously. Wouldn't it have worked better if they felt like actual characters we at least somewhat understand (even if they're morally very wrong), rather than over the top evil caricatures? Because tonally they do not really feel like they belong in this otherwise pretty realistic and grounded world.
My other flaw which is just a trope I am tired of in prehistoric human fiction: the endless sexism and misogyny. I think I have yet to read a book in this genre that doesn't in some way or form have misogyny. It's rarely the other way around or absent. I know that this is an older book, but man it just sucks that I can't seem to find any books in this genre that doesn't have some sort of misogyny going on. I'm also not saying this subject matter can never be written about or anything, but I am saying that it starts to feel extremely monotone and frustrating when every single book in this prehistoric fiction genre I've read so far deals with it. Apparently it's just really hard for authors to think outside box on this one. Are you writing a fiction about prehistoric humans? Must have sexism in it.
That said, there's some good stuff in this book as well. The main four characters (Torka, Lonit, Umak and Karana) are pretty well-rounded and overall likable (even if they sometimes have their moments of being unlikable). Torka out of the four honestly I got the least into despite him being the main character, but he's not badly written by any means. My favorites were the other three, particularly Lonit and Karana. There's also Brother Dog but he isn't really a rounded character, he's just kind of there for parts of the story.
Like I said before, some of the characters from Galeena's tribe were also okay, but none of them get that much time to shine before they vanish out of the picture, so we never really get much time to build a close relationship between these characters and our main ones. There's a bit of time skipping, but that's not enough to convey a deep, three-dimensional relationship to your reader. The biggest impression the reader gets is that these characters are not godawful like the rest of their tribe, and that they have a solid relationship with our protagonists.
Finally I also do like the ending revelation where Torka somewhat forgives the killer mammoth for wiping out his tribe, as he sees that just like people, mammoths are also creatures with feelings and relationships. This also really shows well how he is different from Galeena and his tribe, because you just know they without hesitation would've murdered the shit out of that mammoth and let its body go to waste if they could. So that was a neat conclusion.
But ultimately I found this to be a bit of a frustrating reading experience despite some elements being quite good. I genuinely am done with misogyny in this genre for a lifetime, and the cartoon-y villains were hard to take seriously and did not feel like they fit into this universe.
Also this is a random side note but for a book that keeps constantly hammering home the point that Lonit is supposed to be ugly she sure does just look like a generic-looking woman on the cover of my edition.
Rating: 3/5
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