Animal Wife CL

By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Book Overview

Light years separate Thomas's intelligent, literate fiction from most other novels set in prehistoric times. Exuding authenticity and distinguished by resonant language, this novel, a companion to Reindeer Moon, is likewise set in the savannastet of the Siberian Paleolithic. The narrator, Kori, and his hunter-gatherer people are portrayed as heroic but also fallible, sometimes prey to bad judgment and overwhelming passions. Kori is beset by guilt when he realizes that his shaman father's new wife is pregnant with Kori's child, conceived in secret before his father chose to marry her. Later, seized with lust at the sight of a woman swimming in a pond, he impulsively captures her, putting his group in peril of her people's revenge. The woman, whom he names Muskrat, comes from a tribe whose customs, worship, sexual practices and hunting techniques are different from Kori's. These alien beliefs and mutually incomprehensible languages are as crippling to their relationship as a deep ethnic division is in any time; intolerance and distrust breed bitterness and tragedy. Thomas has a magical feel for the patterns of the natural world integral to the hunter-gather culture. While this novel does not have the heart-tugging poignance of the previous story, it is psychologically acute and soaringly imaginative.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0395524539
• ISBN13: 9780395524534
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 289 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Excellent

Thomas can write a book that is totally plausible. Harsh, unromantic, and heads above the rest of this genre. If you want a prehisoric love romance, don't bother. If you care about good writing, read on.

Excellent 'follow-up' to Reindeer Moon

Writing a sequel to Reindeer Moon could certainly not be an easy task, but Animal Wife does an astonishingly good job. In Reindeer Moon we were staggered by this author's excellent descriptive prose relating nature's unsympathetic brutality to those humans of prehistory. Animal wife takes it even further, recounting man's brutality to one another. While told from a male perspective as opposed to Reindeer's female perspective, the mood is less forbidding and leans more towards the self-confidence that a future leader needs to have despite the unimaginable adversity. Once again the author's characters were markedly developed and anything but primitive with their complex social structure, complete with infighting, bickering and backstabbing. The only downside of this novel is that we readers are left with the anguish of this being the author's last work of prehistory fiction.

Not much different than Reindeer Moon, but a well told tale

These two books could have been one book really, they are very much alike. Instead of the girl Yanan telling her story we have the boy Kori, son of the shaman Swift from "Reindeer". A good summer read, well worth it.

Above average original work

This is a well written and entertaining book (though perhaps not as interesting as the author's other prehistoric novel, Reindeer Moon. It's quite different from some other more popular novels set in early human history, in part because Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is better able than other authors to get inside the heads of people very different from ourselves. It's not great literature, but it is certainly an interesting, engaging book.