Hekla's Children is a novel that taps into horror, mythology, fantasy, archeology, and the British countryside. The monster of the story is the afaugh, sort of a British Wendigo: a spirit of cannibalism and greed which possesses people and makes them do terrible things. At the start of the novel, an ancient tribe plagued by the afaugh decides to make a sacrifice to hold it at bay.
Fast forward to ten years ago, when a group of kids on a scouting exercise in a small woodland adjacent to a city suddenly disappear when their group leader leaves them on their own.
Fast forward to now, when a skeleton is found in those very same woods, and an archeologist is called in to determine if it's old or young enough to potentially be a victim of a crime that the police need to solve...
Hekla's Children is in an outstanding novel. It mixes science (archeology), myth, the uncanny, horror, and a timeless mythological realm with great skill and fluidity. The closest comparison I can think of is The Truth Is A Cave In The Black Mountains by Neil Gaiman, which has a similar atmosphere, perhaps a little more condensed and distilled and sharp, but similar enough for this novel to belong in the same space as that novella.
It's not just a novel of atmosphere: the story never gets boring, and there is real tension at pretty much every stage of the book. I don't know whether the book is a "horror" novel, but it's dark and pretty ruthless in the way it treats its characters, and there is some fundamental dread at times when they are being pursued by the monstrous...
I can't think of anything to fault the novel for. It's entertaining, atmospheric and beautifully grim. Highly recommended to those who like their fiction dark.
A Prehistory of South America is not a pop-science book. Instead, it was written as a book for undergraduate archaeologists and those who are quite interested in Latin American history and archaeology. As such, it is well outside my usual reading habits.
First things first: "prehistory", as used by the author, means pre-European-conquest. This is because once Europeans arrive, they write the history of their own actions, and even record some information about the locals they find (albeit much distorted by their own biases). Before Europeans, the societies and civilizations that lived in South America did not chronicle their own histories in a way that can still be read by today's historians. What forms of writing and recording there were (besides oral histories) are largely impenetrable now: some civilizations had hieroglyphic records, others used systems of strings and knots (the khipus in the Andean areas), others used stylized pictorial art to convey meaning and myth to the initiated, but each of those records is far removed from written language. Therefore, the knowledge we have of pre-conquest societies is fluid, subject to new discoveries, and incomplete.
Jerry Moore argues that archaeology has to take the lead in revealing information about these societies: the oral histories that reached conquistador chroniclers are insufficient, partially because most of the conquistadors weren't even trying to be unbiased, and partially because the oral history was incomplete and equally biased.
A Prehistory of South America is probably the closest thing to the book I was hoping to find. What I really wanted was a sort of encyclopedia, organised on a timeline, with plenty of maps, telling me which societies lived where, how they lived their lives, how they were organised, and how they developed, over time, from the first arrival of man until the arrival of Europeans. Unfortunately, it looks like that is not actually possible, as the knowledge simply does not fully exist yet.
Instead, the book is organised into chapters which look at different aspects. Say, the arrival of humans. Or the rise of agriculture and different methods of subsisting and exploiting natural resources. Each chapter uses a handful of case studies from across the continent, and none of the chapters are bound purely by chronology. So a society living 3000BC and a society living 800AD may be showcased in the same thematic chapter, despite the huge gulf in time (and location) between them. At first, I worried this way of looking at things would be chaotic to my brain, but actually, it works very well.
Even at 500+ pages, the book can only offer a cursory look at each society and each civilization. Fortunately, the book is richly illustrated with photographs, maps, drawings, and academic references to give the reader a clearer idea what is being described, and where to go for more in-depth information. It is written in a style that is clear, generally accessible despite being somewhat academic, and the author always makes clear how certain a bit of knowledge is, or where alternative theories are still not settled.
In short, the book is fantastic starting point for finding out about the history of pre-colonial South America - which is a mindbogglingly fascinating topic. Unfortunately, it is not (and cannot be) The Ultimate Reference about that topic, because the research is still in its infancy.
It is a fascinating book. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5/5
Addendum: I read the book, and am reading around the topic, to research for a fiction project I am hoping to write soon. My interest was piqued by a superb TV series - Lost Kingdoms of South America - which is jaw-droppingly exciting and intriguing. I would recommend watching the programme in combination with reading this book, for a more immersive experience. Sadly, one of the peoples I am trying to find out more about - the Chachapoya - is barely mentioned in this textbook. Oh well, more reading to be done!
Episodes of Lost Kingdoms of South America:
Muslim Girl is one of those things that seems a little hard to define. It started out as a web community and blog (on Livejournal! Remember Livejournal?), but these days, it's a Facebook page, a Twitter profile, a website, a hashtag, a column in magazines, a slogan on apparel... essentially, Muslim Girl is now a brand rather than any singular entity. It is the brainchild of Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, and now it is also a book - her autobiography.
From its scattershot, breathless introduction, to the very last page, the book zips from one thought to the next, largely without a linear path. This was a surprise: I'd vaguely expected an autobiography, possibly with a little politics and a dollop of lifestyle stuff for young female Muslims (which is more or less what I perceive Muslimgirl.com to be), but generally following the linear route that autobiographies tend to take. Like pretty much every expectation I had about the book, this was not the case.
The introduction sums up the essence of the Muslim Girl project. The first sentence:
"I'm kind of playing the game right now," I told Contessa Gayles in the bathroom of Muslim Girl's overpriced studio in Brooklyn, New York.
Then, after the name dropping (who is Contessa Gayles? Never heard of the woman) a brisk tour of post-millennium history and some of the things that sent shockwaves around Muslim communities in the West (9/11, France's headscarf ban, the Iraq War and American atrocities against Iraqis, Trump), followed by the final paragraph which sums up the Muslim Girl media phenomenon:
I think we've become starved for people to actually listen to us. We've become so desperate to hear our own voices above all the white noise that we have willfully compromised and repackaged our narratives to make them palatable - to make them commercial and catchy, to make them headline-worthy, to sell a story that you will find deserving of your attention. We call it playing the game, because you consuming some semblance of our truth is better than you consuming whatever else is out there, conjured by someone else on our behalf. But that's not good enough any more.
("White noise" ... Hah! I certainly did not expect her to use a pun...)
Reading the book was easy and pleasant enough: it's accessibly written, jumping around thoughts and little scenes fast enough not to get boring, and while it may occasionally get quite ranty, the rants rarely get to that eye-rolling stage. That said, the book did not leave me with very strong impressions or a deeper understanding of anything. My most fundamental take-away from the book is a certain envy of Amani: ten years younger than myself, she has achieved so much more, and left her mark on the world in a way that I have not. I can only take my hat off at her achievements.
I guess the second take-away is the matter of identity. I was 19 when the two towers fell. The author was 9. I'm a white, atheist male. She is an Arab Muslim. For me, world politics since 9/11 has often felt like an enormous, slow-motion train wreck: something with near-infinite momentum, with atrocities, disasters, injustice, and erosion of the liberal, multicultural values that I hold dear, and something I have been completely impotent to stop or change, no matter how many petitions I signed, protests I attended, or charities I donated to to undo some of the damage. When all is said and done, I have always been a spectator, which is, I guess, the luxury afforded to me by my visible identity. For Amani, a young Muslim girl, the geopolitical events weren't something that she could watch from outside, but something that shone a spotlight on her identity, and seemingly defined her life. I have to admit to being quite tired of identity politics, and every time someone mentions "intersectionality" I groan inwardly. The book did remind me that this is a luxury that not everyone shares, and that there are some instances where ticking many boxes in the check list of "disadvantaged groups" really does mean an accumulation of troubles.
Where the book fell flat is in the "autobiography" bit. Perhaps it's because the author is still so young that she simply hasn't lived long enough to have many stories to tell. But my suspicion is that Amani shares a quality with many Muslims: that of being essentially a private person. It's perfectly understandable (and wise, in a world where racists are emboldened), but it means that even after reading the book, I have only the vaguest notion of what her family are like, and virtually no idea who else is in her life. I might know about some instances when she was bullied, but there is very little that's personal in the book. If you were hoping that Muslim Girl would be like a Millennial Muslim version of Caitlin Moran's "How to be a Woman" (as I must sheepishly admit, I was), then that hope, too, will not be realised.
Finally, the book made me wonder about the future of Muslim Girl. When it launched, the idea of a pop culture, lifestyle-heavy, feminist, tolerant media outlet for Muslim Girls was overdue, revolutionary, and ripe. Now, after the girlpower phase is possibly approaching its zenith, with Amani appearing in music videos and casually name dropping celebrities she's met in her first autobiography, I cannot help but wonder: will Muslim Girl grow up? Will we see Muslim Woman, aimed at the Linda Sarsour generation, perhaps a little less consumerist and hip, perhaps daring not just to "play the game" but to meet the problems Muslim women face head-on: right-wing populism, discrimination and Islamophobia in the West, genuine oppression and persecution in Persia and much of the Arab world...
In summary: the book might not be exactly what you expect from an autobiography. It chronicles a life that has only just begun, and it shines a spotlight on how Muslims in the West are victimised by a society where racism flourishes, rather than giving in-depth, personal insight into one life, but it's short, never boring, and worth a read.
