The Book Depository Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson
620 ratings
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Price: £9.99
Brand: The Book Depository
Description: Shaman : Paperback : Little, Brown Book Group : 9780356500454 : : 10 Jun 2014 : An extraordinary portrayal of life in the Palaeolithic era, 30,000 years into our past, by the multi-award-winning author described recently by the Sunday Times as 'one of science fiction's greats. The Book Depository Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: The Book Depository
Product ID: 9780356500454
MPN: 9780356500454
GTIN: 9780356500454
Author: Kindle Customer
Rating: 5
Review: I loved this book, the interaction between the characters are,at times very sad and full of meaning. Loons cave would be beautiful to see and I enjoyed the ghosts too I will be looking for more books from this author Christine Beard
Author: Iset
Rating: 3
Review: I’m really in two minds about this book. It’s obvious that the writing is skilled, in a technical sense. Indeed, it’s difficult to find fault with it. But I felt it was lacking from a story-telling point of view. First thing’s first, there were some minor irritations. Names for animals and objects were sometimes completely made up, with no explanation of what they were, and even Google failing to elucidate the matter – what is an “elg” anyway? Another really weird thing is that the author used dashes to indicate dialogue, not quotation marks, which made the difference between dialogue and narrative actually very confusing consistently throughout the book and was not a good technical choice at all. I was hoping that some of this would be clarified in an author’s note at the end elucidating certain authorial choices and discussing the historical evidence that inspired the story, but there wasn’t one. So let me turn to the story. I was quite interested and engaged during the first section of the story, where Loon is sent out to wander the wilderness alone as some sort of coming of age rite. There was survival action aplenty, and because he was totally alone and the environs were against him, it made for pretty tense and gripping stuff. However, I felt that it lost steam after that. Loon and his pack go about their lives as normal, and whilst interesting from a background and setting point of view, I’m wondering when the plot will show up. Then, around the three-quarters mark, it does so. Okay, so I was pleased that the plot finally showed up, but I wasn’t exactly excited by it. The chase survival plot is very well-worn in the Stone Age fiction genre. Savage Eden did it, The Uprights did it, and much more high profile films Quest for Fire and 10,000 BC did it. I could have got on board with it, if I cared about the characters. But I didn’t. The secondary characters felt barely sketched to me, and as for Loon, I just had no sense of his struggles and his fears, his hopes and dreams, his relatable thoughts, to feel close to him in any way. I just didn’t feel compelled to root for him. I felt disappointingly detached the whole way through. And that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the book. It wasn’t that it was bad – although there were a couple of irritating niggles – I just felt disengaged because there didn’t seem to be much of a plot for long stretches, and when it did show up it was a trope and one in which I had no real incentive to care about the characters. I just felt disconnected from most of the book.
