Reviews

Gr 4-6-The author of A Bone from a Dry Sea (Dell, 1995) opens a quartet of novels also set in our distant past. After a devastating raid, the dazed survivors of the Moonhawk Kin flee to safety. They split up when two orphans, Suth and Noli, defy their headman's orders and return to the place where four young children were abandoned. Following Noli's visions, which she claims are sent by their totemic hawk, Suth leads the tiny band to a verdant haven in the crater of a volcano where they fall in with a group of cave dwellers who claim to be Monkey Kin. As Dickinson develops distinct personalities and inner conflicts in each of his characters, he inserts between chapters a creation myth in which Monkey, a trickster, brings sorrow, hunger, and ultimately murder into the world. In light of this, and seeing how closely the dwindling, inbred Monkey people are watching him, Suth is understandably uneasy. Though the author sometimes lets the plot coast while he's establishing believable, well-articulated cultural backgrounds for his protohuman cast, the pace does pick up near the end as Suth earns adult status by killing a leopard, and later engineers an escape for the Moonhawks when the volcano erupts. Less a self-contained story than an intriguing lead-in, this novel will prepare middle readers for the subsequent adventures of a young but resourceful band in a world 200 millennia agone.-John Peters, New York Public Library

Favorite fiction returns in volumes designed to attract new readers. Master storyteller Peter Dickinson's tale of The Kin, set in Africa 200,000 years ago, reexamines themes he explored in A Bone from a Dry Sea. One impressive volume gathers the four tales originally published separately in the U.S. (Suth's Story; Noli's Story; Ko's Story; and Mana's Story). The quartet relates the epic adventures of a small band of children who struggle to survive after their families have been killed. Dickinson intersperses within their narrative a smattering of "Oldtales," the pourquoi myths of their tribe, the Kin. PW said in a starred review of Noli's Story, "The real adventure here is the exhilarating mix of ideas the novel so nimbly sets forth." Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.