The Raven Bride   by Will Baker

Aug 2005     Picked up second hand from the English Shop in Gütersloh.

It looked not-too-bad when I saw it in this little specialty food shop, during one of the times I went there with the Detmold Theater. And the book wasn't bad. -But I wouldn't say it was great either. It was ... mediocre. Not more. It's a little bit like science fiction, but mostly just a novel. It's about essentially present day Russia, where a big American Forestry Industry has a secret camp, where they're trying out some new gold-mining equipment, but our Half-Native, book-loving heroine is in some danger doing scientific research in the area, and a local tribe of nomads takes her in, much to the worry and consternation of the big bad company. And, what do you know: our heroine is distantly related to this group of nomads, and has some sort of spiritual rejuvenation; She finds her self, and figures out what is REALLY important to her. And then there's the finale, where the big-bad company is trying to kill her and the one native she's running away with, because they've seen the camp, and what's going on there, and could tell authorities which would ruin their multi-billion dollar deal that's in the works. The native dies, but she lives, and (oh Gosh!) she's pregnant, which leads her to decide to live in some happy medium, with the old-native traditions, plus true, hard science.

Well, it wasn't as bad as I made it sound. Really, it was only the plot that was that lame; The dialogue, the narrative style, and the obvious research that went into this book were all fine, if not good. The anthropologist in me loved to have this peek into the lives of a group of Caribou Herders in Siberia, But not simply a centuries old, traditional one, but one that deals with the problems of the time: pressure to settle, and conform, and give up their nomadic life, the effects of contact with big industry, and with the total foreigners that come with it, and so on. Towards the end of it, there was even a good amount of honest suspense built up, (as opposed to suspense, put in only because the author thought there should be some there.) I was reading on, simply because I wanted to see what happened next.

The author also gets more points from me, because he didn't simplify everything for the Western Audience. To be specific, he left in many of the Native words, giving a feeling of what the Heroine might have felt, not being able to understand them. Perhaps a little oddly, he also left in a number of Russian words. -The few I can spot at the moment though, are used when there are English speakers in the conversation, so it could be only used when a mix of Russian and English wants to be shown. (I'm not going to check to confirm that though.) There was also the bad-english of Russians who have only a basic grip on the language. In those places, it was spelled phonetically, showing all the mis-pronunciations that were made. I think that this can only work well with people who don't know the way Russians sound, speaking English; At least, it didn't work well for me;I had always a different way of pronouncing the words I read, then the way I would think a Russian would speak them. (I hope that made some sense.)

HHmmmm... Hmmm... like I've said, it's not a bad book. But I think I will have forgotten most things about it in a week or two, so I can't say that it really interested me.