Help! Help! Mammoths walk into sea! Husband chase with big rock!Gotta love these PEOPLE books. I mean, what's not to love about a 1000 page novel where noble Native Americans battle their way through ancient landscapes that we know so little about?Problem is, the Gears spend so much time getting the archaeology just right, (have to make sure you know ALL the best flint quarries, and EVERY wild flower in the medicine man's sack) sometimes they forget about little things, like characters, plot, storyline. So in this novel -- set in California, right at the end of the Ice Age, when the mammoths are dying out and the glaciers are melting so fast the people can actually see it happen -- there's this good medicine man named Sunchaser, who basically loves everyone. And there's this bad medicine man, named Mean Old Man, or Many Mean Moods, or something, who basically hates everyone. And then there's this runaway squaw, Cheats On Husband, or Likes It Rough, or something, and she's On The Run. But the mammoths are all dying! It's not that I don't respect the Native American characters. It's just that they're so flat and cardboard and lifeless. The nice guy. The mean guy. The girl in trouble. Do you really need an archaelogy degree to write this stuff? The sad thing is, the setting is waaaay more interesting than the characters. I mean, it's so intriguing the way they drop hints about the climate, like how "the ice giants are dying, moaning in the night," as the glaciers melt. Or the way the mammoths literally walk into the sea when the grass is all gone. Or how the hunters brag about killing ten saber-tooth tigers every year, only this year they only kill five because they're so scarce . . .Really it's like the characters get in the way of the setting!
In essence this is the story of a young wife who escapes her homicidal husband after suffering domestic violence and turning to another man because of loneliness. Her lover is killed and she flees, pursued. Running parallel with this (and gradually intermeshing) is the tale of a spiritual leader struggling to understand the changes taking place in his world. Now put this story back a few thousand years into just post-glacial America and a whole new dimension opens up.My only problem with the Gears is that they always start with a scientific stance (the evidence of archeological digs and research) yet introduce fantasy elements such as real contact with spirits, witchcraft, possession etc that contradict the physical. One has to be patient with this unfortunate anomaly because the stories are often quite entertaining but they would work just as well with a bit of harsh reality.
