This is one of my favorite sci-fi's. About the survival of a lone australopithicus! I enjoyed it, and my daughter melissa has read it several times. ( )

An interesting exploration of the idea that some "Human traits" are less mutable than we moderns would like. Even a Homo Habilis can operate reasonably well in modern society. Sometimes that is really inconvenient, especially for a "Prosperity Gospel" preacher. ( )

What does it mean to be human? Bishop's somewhat shaky novel tends to make us want to think that our older/simpler ancestors might actually be better [off]. Reminiscent of the "Ishi" story, this is also a story of prejudice - showing us our innate xenophobic tendencies. ( )

Honestly this novel treaded pretty close to awful at times. Back in the 1980's there was a lot of attention paid to early humans, Neanderthals, speculations on ancient human history, protohumans, and books like Clan of the Cave Bear and a few of the sequels were wildly popular. There was the movie Iceman, and other novels such as Reindeer Moon and ones whose titles don't quickly come to mind. This novel speculates that an ancient species of pre-human (or human) was still in the world, something along the line of Homo Habilis, going along for perhaps 2 million years past their presumed extinction unchanged. The story begins with a woman in Georgia finding this strange gargoyle-like creature in her pecan orchard. They fall in love. They make a baby. Really.

There's much more to the story than this of course.

I'm not quite sure now what I was expecting. The novel is, however, very far from whatever I thought might be there. There is some interesting stuff in here, thoughts about society and prejudice, and a few bits are mildly entertaining, but so much of this story just feels so unbelievably wrong with a cast of characters that are almost universally unlikable that I really felt let down as a reader. The book has three parts. It goes from bad to worse. Not recommended.

The book was first published in 1985. ( )

this is a sort of fantasy/sci fi book. The only possible reason I can see for anyone to read it is that it has a certain amount of Georgia "local color". For what it's worth, my view is that this feature, which is smaller than you might think, does not justify all these pages of strictly PC ruminations. As usual with books of this type, it starts with an interesting idea, but one which can only be spun out for a certain number of pages, far fewer than necessary to create a saleable "story". this work once again illustrates that an interesting idea and a certain amount of technical writing ability does not create something worth keeping.