[amazon_link id=”0316098078″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Title : Shaman
Author : Kim Stanley Robinson
Genre : Sci-fi/Anthropological
Publisher : Orbit
Publish date : September 3, 2013
Pages : 464
Source : Publisher/Netgalley
Rating : 3.5/5

Loon is a young adolescent of the Wolf tribe in Ice Age times. We meet him as a young orphan, being brought up by the pack’s Shaman Thorn and by the medicine woman Heather. Loon is apprenticed as a young Shaman although he isn’t sure he wants to be one. Shaman is about Loon, and takes us through his life, a little by little, and can be described to be a book of the “coming-of-age” genre.

Shaman is strong on detail, and presents to us Ice age life as our ancestors lived it. The clothes, food, lifestyle, nomadic habits, society, social rituals and status of women and men are all described from Loon’s point-of-view, and narrated by the “Third Wind” a force which apparently helps people survive when they are at the end of their rope. The narrative progresses season by season; the spring is when the pack catches and stores food to last through the harsh and possibly lean winter, where one might not be able to find any meat or any edible vegetation.

Loon is a likeable enough character, so it is easy to be invested in his life story. The description of Loon’s adventures is engrossing, like the “wander” he is forced into going on, naked and defenseless for a fortnight, without the protective cocoon of his pack members. His pack-members are like regular people – some good, some bad, some mean and some bossy. The story flows naturally and organically, and makes for smooth reading.

Shaman reads like an exquisitely described, interesting history lesson, garbed as a work of fiction. The book is low on plot and there isn’t much suspense, so I’m not as thrilled with it as I though I would have been. The language of the book is simple and blunt, shorn of sophistication as we might imagine prehistoric man’s to be, very apt for the book.

I haven’t read Robinson before so can’t make a comparison with his earlier novels. Shaman may not be your adventure filled sci-fi novel, since it is more philosophical and less action-filled than hard sci-fi tends to be, but it is a good read.