This one looked very interesting to me when I found it on a secondhand book website. Let's check it out. Spoilers ahead. Also, content warning for mentions of sexual assault.
We travel back to prehistoric times and meet the People. In their group, a two-way split is going on as some of the younger hunters want to follow an inexperienced shaman, named Runs in Light, across the ice. Meanwhile, a cantankerous old shaman who has lost his powers, alongside Runs in Light's brother Raven Hunter, are traveling to their old hunting grounds, where Raven Hunter seeks to wage war against a people known as the Others. The People of the Wolf will have to decide which way to go for the future, in order to survive.
Are you ever just, well, frustrated by a book? Because there's some stuff in there that's really good, but there's also some stuff that just ticks you off? Yeah, case in point, this book.
I definitely liked some elements in this book a lot. I liked Dancing Fox, and Heron, and Broken Branch, and I think the old villainous shaman (I don't know what his name is in the English edition, I read the Dutch translation) was a genuinely interesting antagonist. Raven Hunter could also be compelling at times and while Runs in Light/Wolf Dreamer is a pretty basic protagonist he was still interesting enough to keep me engaged.
But then there's the fact that some of the characters are also pretty darn flat and simple. Even the ones I did like or find interesting aren't the most complex characters out there. There's a pretty big divide between characters who are objectively good and objectively bad and there's not a lot of nuance or gray area to be found, at least for most characters. This is why I have a bit of a complex relationship with some of these characters. Even if I found them to be engaging enough, objectively quite a few of them are just not that rounded and well-written. Villains are obviously evil and our heroes are obviously heroic.
What bothered me more though is the amount of sexism and sexual violence in this book, because it is rough. I'm not saying rape never would've happened in this era, but the absolute amount of sexual violence in this book is just mind-blowing. Like, it's really excessive. Sure, the rape scenes aren't that graphic and not described in detail (thank goodness), but there is just a lot of it (as well as mentions of it).
And what's worse, the almost normalization of rape in this book is treated very, very casually by the characters. Like it's just another aspect of life we all have to deal with. Even the women, who are usually the victims in this situation, treat it like it's more of an annoying thing that happens to them from time to time rather than the absolutely traumatizing event it should be treated as. The book just treats the subject of rape as something way too common and trivialized for it to feel like a respectable depiction of it. Heck, Dancing Fox (our female protagonist) ends up marrying a rapist at the ending and somehow his past rape is A) excused and B) this is seen as a happy ending for her. What an absolutely terrible depiction of such a heavy subject matter.
But that really is the worst of it. I do think the rest of the book is pretty solid, except the rather flat characters. I genuinely was invested in this world and the world-building and culture of these different peoples. I liked seeing how the tools were made and worked and how their societies worked, and how life back then was depicted.
However, the treatment of the female characters and especially how rape is trivialized here did bring the book down for me quite a bit, even if (overall) I had a good experience reading it outside of this one aspect.
Rating: 3.5/5
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