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A classic time-travel book from 1975, back in print via Lizzie Skurnick Books. I love the title. It's strangely haunting.
Fourteen-year-old Zan (short for Alexandra) doesn't fit in and worries that she hasn't yet gotten her period. She's fascinated when her history teacher brings up the concept of time as a river, but when she tries to talk to him more about it, he blows her off. She gets mugged and assaulted, and her aunt blows her off. Her brother finds her diary and reads her entries thinking about her body and sex aloud to his friends, humiliating her, and her mother blows her off.
The sheer force of her misery sends her back in time to the Stone Age, where she falls in with a tribe preparing for the Susuru, a month-long ritual celebrating all the girls who have begun menstruating since last year's Susuru. Zan has an extremely rocky adjustment and goes catatonic for a while, but is brought out of it by the tribe's wise woman. She learns the language, makes friends, and becomes an accepted member of the tribe even though, like in her previous life, she was also an outsider.
Zan's life with the cave people makes up the meat of the book, and it's very good. Mazer depicts them and their lives as idyllic in some ways (they spend a lot of time playing and resting, they gather eggs and bugs but don't hunt and there's food all around them, and there's no sexism or war), and the opposite of idyllic in others (no modern medicine, one of the boys was rescued by his mother from being killed because he has a craniofacial malformation, the food is gross as they don't wash anything and the only thing they cook is worms), but above all, as believable individuals in a plausible cultural setting.
As far as I could tell the culture was mostly imagined rather than researched, but it does have a bit of a Clan of the Cave Bear feel minus the rape and food you'd actually want to eat. Zan does develop a taste for raw eggs though.
But all good or even semi-good things must come to an end... ( Read more... )
Excellent anthropological cave people narrative enclosed in an awesomely depressing frame story with an ending that isn't just sad in the usual nature of time travel stories, but piles on extra misery from an unanticipated direction. Well, it was the 70s.
Content notes: Child death, cultural practice of killing babies with birth defects, violence, humiliation, ambiguously sexual assault during a mugging, bad parenting, bad therapy, bad teaching, graphic bug eating.
Saturday, The Twelfth Of October
First link goes to the Kindle edition, second to the original paper book. I like the second cover better.
Fourteen-year-old Zan (short for Alexandra) doesn't fit in and worries that she hasn't yet gotten her period. She's fascinated when her history teacher brings up the concept of time as a river, but when she tries to talk to him more about it, he blows her off. She gets mugged and assaulted, and her aunt blows her off. Her brother finds her diary and reads her entries thinking about her body and sex aloud to his friends, humiliating her, and her mother blows her off.
The sheer force of her misery sends her back in time to the Stone Age, where she falls in with a tribe preparing for the Susuru, a month-long ritual celebrating all the girls who have begun menstruating since last year's Susuru. Zan has an extremely rocky adjustment and goes catatonic for a while, but is brought out of it by the tribe's wise woman. She learns the language, makes friends, and becomes an accepted member of the tribe even though, like in her previous life, she was also an outsider.
Zan's life with the cave people makes up the meat of the book, and it's very good. Mazer depicts them and their lives as idyllic in some ways (they spend a lot of time playing and resting, they gather eggs and bugs but don't hunt and there's food all around them, and there's no sexism or war), and the opposite of idyllic in others (no modern medicine, one of the boys was rescued by his mother from being killed because he has a craniofacial malformation, the food is gross as they don't wash anything and the only thing they cook is worms), but above all, as believable individuals in a plausible cultural setting.
As far as I could tell the culture was mostly imagined rather than researched, but it does have a bit of a Clan of the Cave Bear feel minus the rape and food you'd actually want to eat. Zan does develop a taste for raw eggs though.
But all good or even semi-good things must come to an end... ( Read more... )
Excellent anthropological cave people narrative enclosed in an awesomely depressing frame story with an ending that isn't just sad in the usual nature of time travel stories, but piles on extra misery from an unanticipated direction. Well, it was the 70s.
Content notes: Child death, cultural practice of killing babies with birth defects, violence, humiliation, ambiguously sexual assault during a mugging, bad parenting, bad therapy, bad teaching, graphic bug eating.
Saturday, The Twelfth Of October
First link goes to the Kindle edition, second to the original paper book. I like the second cover better.
