Review: A solid entry in a very competitive genre!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 07 22, 2013
I've been a long-time fan of well-written pre-history - Jean Auel's "Earth's Children" series, Sue Harrison, Linda Lay Shuler, William Sarabande's "The First Americans", Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear and, of course, Björn Kurtén's ground-breaking anthropological masterwork "Dance of the Tiger". Pre-historical fiction as a genre is a field against which competition can be expected to be stiff and the qualifying bar even for entry to the contest is very high indeed.Jack Rourk's debut entry clears the bar with plenty of room to spare. A pastoral, quiet yet deeply moving and compelling story, CRO-MAGNON 25000 BP lacks a significant plot-line at the outset but makes it up with a beautiful portrayal of tribal life during the waning years of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon co-existence in a brief warm spell between ice ages. Rourk has touched on so many topics in so few pages and done it so well that it's almost hard to believe - early spiritualism and creation legends; astronomy; hunting; the development and "manufacture" of weapons; tribal justice; shamanism and medicine; tribal warfare; animal and human migration; and much more.If Rourk decides to attack another novel and continue the story of young Elya's growth and education as a shaman leading her adopted family, the Lion tribe, into an encounter with the cannibals who savagely eliminated her original family, then count me an eager fan and a ready buyer of that next installment.Highly recommended.Paul Weiss