A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

17-year-old Silvie lives in a three-person cult run by her father, who forces her and her mother to live in his imaginary version of Iron Age Northumbria, which is suspiciously similar to his racist, sexist worldview. They're joined for the summer by a professor and three students who are doing an anthropology course. While foraging and washing in a creek is Silvie's ordinary life, it's a game to the students, who let her see her father through others' eyes and make her realize that she could have a different life.

But while Silvie is starting to see the problems with Iron Age re-enactment, the professor and some of the students are getting scarily into it. Especially the parts about human sacrifice...

Ghost Wall is a dense book with a lot going on thematically and a very small scale in terms of action. It's told in Silvie's stream-of-consciousness, which does not use quote marks for dialogue. I listened to it in audio as that's hard for me to read, and I really wanted to read this book as it involves aspects of cults, folk horror, nature, and historical re-enactments - all things which I'm very interested in.

As it turns out, it's actually primarily about something else I'm interested in, which is breaking free of an abusive environment. Unfortunately, like many books of that sort it ends as soon as Silvie gets out, when I would have really liked to see what happened to her afterward. (Maybe next Yuletide.)

Some of the most interesting and perceptive moments involve the difficulty of understanding, let alone recreating the ancient past, even when done by more disinterested parties than Silvie's awful father. A local woman points out that Iron Age people lived in a completely different environment which had far more biodiversity, and so it may have had much more plentiful foraging and hunting opportunities. No one knows why the bog people were sacrificed, or what the victims believed about it - was it a blood sacrifice or domestic violence or something modern people have never even guessed at?

It's an interesting, worthwhile book with a very distinctive and well-done voice, but probably not something I'd re-read. (Not because of the subject matter. Stream of consciousness, especially without dialogue tags, is not my favorite style.)

As a result of reading this, I picked up Paleofantasy by Marlene Zuk, an apparently exhaustively researched look at what we actually know about early humans. It's very interesting so far; if anyone would like, I can post on it as I go along as it's not a read-in-one-sitting type of book.

Just look at that gorgeous cover design. So clever and beautiful.