“The evening storytelling had been Snap’s favorite part of the harvest …”
NEWS AND REVIEWS
Library Journal 7/15/2009
Wednesday July 15, 2009
Austin, a former obstetrician with a lifelong passion for paleoanthropology, has written an original and fascinating first novel set approximately 500,000 years ago in Africa, the cradle of humankind. Now that she has grown into womanhood, 12-year-old Snap, granddaughter of the Kura clan’s matriarchal leader, looks forward to the springtime bonding ceremony, marking the time when the men return from hunting and trading. In her clan, men and women come together only for the summer months, when the women select the men they will mate with for the season. Snap and her new mate, Ash, are blissfully happy, their time together marred only by her mother’s choice of mate, Bapoto, who brings with him strange new ideas of religion and male dominance. In her notes, Austin explains that she based Snap’s world both on the research of evolutionary biologists and paleoanthropologists and on her own speculation of how Homo erectus may have developed art, religion, trade, societal norms, and language. VERDICT Though somewhat reminiscent of Sue Harrison’s and Jean M. Auel’s books about prehistoric peoples, this debut, which offers a fascinating peek into humanity’s earliest days, stands out as well researched and wholly believable.