BizCar - English Language Books: International supplier of books in the English language
|
|
|
| The Sacred Stones: A Novel of the First Americans | 
 enlarge | Author: William Sarabande
Publisher: Bantam
Category: Book
Buy New: $7.99 (18.81 RON)
Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 59781
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 608
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 6.9 x 4.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 055329105X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780553291056
ASIN: 055329105X
Publication Date: October 1, 1991
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Promotion: Buy 4 eligible items in the 4-for-3 promotion offered by Amazon.com and get 1 of them free. Terms and Conditions
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 8 | | NEXT » |
 Not as good as the priors January 7, 2008
Read all the books leading up to this one. They were really involving, followed each other well, were able to build upon one another. This last book: Sacred Stones was not. It felt as if it was by a different author trying to write about the same subject many many years later and hide the fact that they were not the same author. It was a pretty decent book, but if you are getting thies in order to continue the sequence, then you will be let down I think.
 The Sacred Stones October 6, 2007
Again William Sarabande has hit the mark!!! Gutsy story, full of wonderful dialog, and well researched history of the First Americans. I couldnt put the book down. He nails his caracters with the first introduction to them in the story line, and builds upon them as they play vital roles in the story. Will look forward to more of his works as they come available. Thank you for a wonderful reading sensation.
 Extremely bloody as Sarabande like its May 30, 2005
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
William Sarabande is the gore-master of the ancient people series. He occasionally rises to descriptive eloquence, and he very occasionally tries to describe ancient cooking and housekeeping methods, like Jean Auel does (but much better). But the overriding thing that I hate about Sarabande is the unrelenting blood! Horrific killings, sacrifices of virgins, tortures, delayed deaths, yuck. I know that some Native Americans practiced horrific killings (I hated "Dances with Wolves" too!) But this is not entertainment for me. It is horror, like watching Gremlins or reading a Stephen King novel. I also felt that the religious themes of this novel were too advanced, too close to what we know, to sound authentic. For example, Ysuna will gain life everlasting if she eats of the white mammoth. Is this something that true Native Americans believed? I don't know. It just sounded suspiciously like Western thought (or Middle Eastern blood atonement religions.)
I read this book because I liked a previous one where Navakh was almost a real character, and even his moment of death was described quite interestingly. But even that novel was real bloody. I shouldn't have thought Sarabande would change. Sorry.
 It beats being force-fed a coat-hanger, but not by much. July 2, 2003
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
I'm disturbed by the rave reviews this book is getting from the other reviewers on this and other sites; I'm reading this entire series, recommended to me by a trusted friend as something terrifically *bad*, out of something akin to horrified fascination with the idea that this is what sells, this is what people are reading. I worry about the human race; Sarabande's characters are flat and uninteresting, unrealistically motivated, speak and think with identical voices ... the only reason we know their personalities are different from each other's is because the author goes out of the way to *describe* those personalities to us. The author slept through those introductory English classes where the professors beat "show, not tell!" into your head with a two-by-four. The bizarre leap from one set of characters and time period to another, possibly an attempt to start over with a clean slate, didn't bother me after the initial moments of "guh? What just happened here?" but the religious reverence with which Torka and Lonit were held in this book was enough to make me gag (although it *does* remind me a bit of the strange reverenge Sarabande is paid by his fans on these websites). The action proceeds at a good clip, and there are *moments* in the book that approach dramatic or fascinating, but there are so many botched attempts, moments of outright stupidity, and agonizing attempts at character development that fall so short of the mark it's almost comical that this is a book (and a series) I cannot respect. Read the phone book instead! It may not be as engaging, but it will probably broaden your horizons!
New land, new people some great storyteller! December 12, 2002
I did wonder at the start why they are following the owl, a Native American symbol of death, at the beginning of the story, until I got it. It did put a small sad level of the inevitability of history in the story that we could have done without, but that is all in the future.
I found it interesting how the author had the characters understand their history as a people with all of the gaps and missing and re-invented parts to make up for the loss of the old knowledge kept by the "Blue Faces". When I found out what the "Sacred Stones" were and what there people thought they were and what they could do I was left shaking my head at their lack of knowledge. How could they forget that they are...ah,well, then I realized that the author had drawn me in and I was hooked to the new series. We must learn new ways.
|
|
|
