My Sister The Moon by Sue Harrison review

Warning: Spoilers in here! Such spoilers, they will spoil book One!


Genre: Historical Fiction.

Length: 400 pages of story, a map and a Glossary in case you forget what a term means. (the terms are mostly explained in the story, unless it is a name.)

Setting: The Aleutian Islands in the year 7039 BC


Summary Chagak's sons are all grown up now. Blue Shell's (remember the pregnant lady in the band of travelers? That's her. She had a girl by the way. If you'd have read the first book you'd know that. :P) Daughter is 15 or 16 summers old, and still has not had her first “time of bleeding” as the author phrases it. This could be because she has no soul, since her father refused to name her. Her father -Gray Bird- is an abusive, lazy man. More than that too though... he's a real asshole frankly. He sells his daughter to traders to use for the night (translation: he lets traders have sex with her -even though she hasn't yet had her first period- so he can get furs and things without having to hunt). Gray Bird's second child is Qakan. He's a chip off the ol' block, only even lazier than his dad, even sneakier, even more cowardly, even more cruel and disgusting and lazy. Both Qakan and Gray Bird have a habit of blaming Blue Shell's Daughter for all of their shortcomings. These are guys you want to see fall off a cliff or get eaten by a polar bear.

Eventually Blue Shell's Daughter gets her period. This means not only is she a woman now, but she gets nine blessed days away from her father and brother, with no work to do! Because she is now a woman, her father agrees to give her a name as well, because without a name Kayugh can not be expected to hold his promise to marry his son to her. But that dirty bastard gives her a name that isn't a name! He names her Kiin, which means “Who?”. Well at least she has a soul now, and Kayugh pays the bride price so Amgigh can marry her. But oh no! Amgigh is not the man she wanted! She wanted to be married to Samiq, his brother, Chagak's actual son. Samiq has other obligations though, he must go to the Whale Hunter to learn to hunt whales. But at least she is a wife, and no longer has to live with her father. Amgigh is upset Samiq gets to learn whale hunting, Samiq is upset that Amgigh gets to marry Kinn, Qakan is upset because now he can't sell Kinn to help him start a trading business.

Or can he? Hmmmmm.

Qakan hatches a plan to just kidnap Kinn, make it look like she died in an accident and go off to sell her anyway! (Told ya, a well placed polar bear would have done the boy good.) Kinn is all moved in to Kayugh's lodge, has had sex with her husband (this is relatively important later on, stick with me.) and gets to spend a few days happy for the first time in her whole life. It's short-lived though. The night before Samiq is to go to the Whale hunters, Amgigh lets Samiq borrow his wife, to the delight of both Kinn and Samiq.

Shortly after Samiq goes to the Whale Hunters (and all the men except Qakan and Gray Bird go with him, to see him off) Qakan leaves to go on his trading trip. But the next day, he comes back, not to the beach, but to where Kinn is out fishing. He whacks her on the head with his oar, punches a hole in the bottom of her boat, and takes her with him on his trading trip.

He rapes her while she is knocked out. (Nope, still no polar bear in sight.)Being that they are brother and sister, this curses her, making him happy, because now she will be less tempted to escape and go back home. Why this would not also curse him in that culture, I don't know. It's a little unfair considering she wasn't conscious at the time, and he did it. But lets move on.

She misses what would have been her second period. She tells Qakan to avoid being hit, because he's been pretty psyched at the possibility of having a son off of her. He isn't a whole lot nicer, but he does stop beating her. He ties her wrists and ankles and makes her continue to do most of the paddling and other work though. Finally they stumble across some hunters from the Walrus People at a beach, and the hunters take them to their village. Here Kinn meets two really old ladies, one of them who has had a vision about Kinn and the cursed babies she carries.(That's right, plural.). One of these sons will be good, the other evil according to the old women, so she must be traded to a man with considerable power. She's traded to a guy named Raven, who it turns out, wants to be shaman of the tribe. (enter dark mysterious villain. We're familiar with the technique from most fantasy books, aren't we.)

From here, you'll need to get your own book and read it. Or, just read my upcoming review of book 3, where I will have to spoil the surprises of book 2 just so you know what the heck I'm talking about.

Review: This is a better book than book one, it raised a whole lot fewer questions other than that of “Where's a hungry polar bear when you need one?” and “Wait, it's her fault her brother raped her while she was knocked out??”. Chagak is in this book too, in a much more minor role.

According to the author: “The basic story line of My Sister The Moon is borrowed from an Aleut sea otter legend – an incest story. Other legends used in the book include the moon myths of the Pueblo and Osage; the Aleut raven's marriage story; the Inuit oral histories of a mother hiding the son of an enemy;blue ice men legends; Ojibway twin sons stories; tiger legends from the Orient (which have counterparts in Aleut whale-hunting traditions);Aleut Shuganan and “Outside Men stories; and the raven-trickster legends, which have parallels throughout most Native American cultures and are so ancient that their roots can be found in the monkey-trickster stories of the Orient.” Okay, so this raises another question: why the heck would you stick Pueblo, Osage and Ojibwe legends in an Alaskan story? * shrugs * well, it made for a more believable story than her first book at least.

The characters are still well written, even if slightly one dimensional (if it's a good guy, he/she's very good, if it's a villain, he/she is very bad, with only very few exceptions). As with the first book, you really can picture being among these people (even if you are pretty sure you'd have found a way to get a polar bear to eat a few of them), in their houses, working beside them. The author is very adept at painting a picture with her words, the over all tone of the books even helps paint that picture.


One annoying thing about these books: Nowhere on the copyright page does it say who did the artwork for the covers. It also never says on the cover who did it, or in the Acknowledgments. And that's a real shame, because the artwork is pretty good, and I'd like to see more of the artist's work.
/ [hanhepi]

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