10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Above average original work, January 22, 1999
By A Customer
This is a well written and entertaining book (though perhaps not as interesting as the author's other prehistoric novel, Reindeer Moon. It's quite different from some other more popular novels set in early human history, in part because Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is better able than other authors to get inside the heads of people very different from ourselves. It's not great literature, but it is certainly an interesting, engaging book.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent 'follow-up' to Reindeer Moon, November 7, 2003
Writing a sequel to Reindeer Moon could certainly not be an easy task, but Animal Wife does an astonishingly good job. In Reindeer Moon we were staggered by this author's excellent descriptive prose relating nature's unsympathetic brutality to those humans of prehistory. Animal wife takes it even further, recounting man's brutality to one another. While told from a male perspective as opposed to Reindeer's female perspective, the mood is less forbidding and leans more towards the self-confidence that a future leader needs to have despite the unimaginable adversity. Once again the author's characters were markedly developed and anything but primitive with their complex social structure, complete with infighting, bickering and backstabbing. The only downside of this novel is that we readers are left with the anguish of this being the author's last work of prehistory fiction.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Hunting for a good prehistoric novel?, August 4, 2010
Given how high the bar had been set by Reindeer Moon, and given the mixed reviews posted here on Amazon, I took up The Animal Wife with some trepidation. I needn't have worried. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas brings to this novel the same strong voice, pacing, psychological insight, and sympathy for her characters that made Reindeer Moon such an utterly convincing portrayal of life in what is now Siberia 20,000 years ago (or thereabouts).
I wouldn't call The Animal Wife a sequel to Reindeer Moon so much as a companion novel. In many ways it is Reindeer Moon's mirror image; the tale--once again a "small" story devoid of the earth-shaking events, spiritual quests, and other "epic" devices that are the undoing of some other novels in the genre--is told from the perspective of an adolescent coming of age, this time a young man; and whereas in Reindeer Moon we absorbed the story from the perspective of a woman of Sali shaman's lineage and were introduced to Swift's people, now the story is told by Swift's son and we come to know the women of Sali's lineage as outsiders.
The tenor of the story itself is somewhat different than that of its predecessor--how could it not be?--but the somewhat simple (but not simplistic), matter-of-fact tone that characterizes the narrators of both books is much the same. In my view this tone plays a big part in making these books so successful in developing these characters as convincing representatives of human beings living so long ago. The author's mother wrote the first major ethnography of the !Kung / San bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, and Thomas has also lived among these people for several years at a stretch and has written a couple of excellent non-fiction treatments of their way of life. The experiences have served her well in portraying the hunter-gatherers of The Animal Wife and Reindeer Moon.
For readers more interested in shambling brutes, rock-em sock-em action, or puerile quests and "chosen ones," this book is NOT what you are looking for. For readers interested in a more pedestrian but more realistic approach to life as it might have been for our distant ancestors, I can recommend nothing more highly than The Animal Wife and Reindeer Moon. These books are so good, and so well written, that they really transcend the genre. A reader could have no interest in paleolithic life whatsoever and still come away feeling they've had a fully satisfying reading experience: interesting characters, a plot that engages, psychological interplay, and skillful writing that draws us out of ourselves and fully into another world. We are delighted, saddened, frightened, angered, confused--we are fully engaged and we are moved and thereby changed, having learned something about the world and ourselves.
This book should never be compared to Jean Auel's books; that would be like comparing healthful organic greens to a McSalad.
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