The Animal Wife (Hardcover)

by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Light years separate Thomas's intelligent, literate fiction from most other novels set in prehistoric times. Exuding authenticity and distinguished by resonant language, this novel, a companion to Reindeer Moon , is likewise set in the savannastet of the Siberian Paleolithic. The narrator, Kori, and his hunter-gatherer people are portrayed as heroic but also fallible, sometimes prey to bad judgment and overwhelming passions. Kori is beset by guilt when he realizes that his shaman father's new wife is pregnant with Kori's child, conceived in secret before his father chose to marry her. Later, seized with lust at the sight of a woman swimming in a pond, he impulsively captures her, putting his group in peril of her people's revenge. The woman, whom he names Muskrat, comes from a tribe whose customs, worship, sexual practices and hunting techniques are different from Kori's. These alien beliefs and mutually incomprehensible languages are as crippling to their relationship as a deep ethnic division is in any time; intolerance and distrust breed bitterness and tragedy. Thomas has a magical feel for the patterns of the natural world integral to the hunter-gather culture. While this novel does not have the heart-tugging poignance of the previous story, it is psychologically acute and soaringly imaginative. Paperback sale to Pocket.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The Animal Wife , which is set in Siberia 20,000 years ago, is a companion novel to Thomas's earlier Reindeer Moon (LJ 1/87). It depicts the life of the hunter-gatherer tribes of those plains through the story of Kori, a young male of the tribe. While out hunting, Kori captures a woman from another tribe whom he names Muskrat. Their evolving relationship and the interactions among the family tribe members as they move from their summer grounds to their winter grounds in the constant search for food form the heart of the novel. Thomas is an anthropologist who has used her experiences with the Kalahari bushmen as background. However, this works best as a work of fiction and not an anthropological study; there is much interest and humor in the male-female conflicts. This will be heavily promoted and, while not as steamy, is likely to appeal to Clan of the Cave Bear fans. --Janet Boyarin Blundell, Brookdale Community Coll., Lincroft, N.J.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 289 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin; First Edition edition (September 27, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395524539
• ISBN-13: 978-0395524534
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,492,555 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 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.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent 'follow-up' to Reindeer Moon, November 7, 2003

By	Vincent Pernice "Vincent Pernice" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not much different than Reindeer Moon, but a well told tale, August 17, 2002

By	Heather H. "Heather H." (New Jersey, United States) - See all my reviews

These two books could have been one book really, they are very much alike. Instead of the girl Yanan telling her story we have the boy Kori, son of the shaman Swift from "Reindeer". A good summer read, well worth it.