Review
Comment:
Since the age of ten, Michelle Paver dreamed about running with wild
wolves in the prehistoric forest; but living in London her options were
limited! She grew up and became a lawyer, but eventually realized that wasn't where her heart was and started to write
books for adults (including
The Shadow Catcher and
Fever Hill),
then one day she came across her long discarded story notes about a boy and
a wolf and all her childhood obsessions came flooding back!
Wolf Brother is the first in a planned six part series set 6,000
years ago in the forests of Northern Europe. It's a fantastic
adventure set in a meticulously researched world of hunter-gatherers, which,
as Paver comments, is a misleading term that conjures up a picture of someone
casually spotting a clump of...
Beyond the Book
To research this series, Paver spent time with a guide in the forests of Finland (some Finnish forests are still much as they would have been 6,000 years ago). She learned how the people lived by
studying archaeology; and to understand what they might have thought she
studied many groups including:
- The San
Tribe of South Africa (formerly known as the Bushmen)
.
- The Ainu
of Northern Japan
.
- The Inuit,
(formerly known as Eskimos, which simply means 'eater of raw meat', whereas
their preferred name Inuit means 'the people' or 'real people')
.
- The Sami
of Northern Europe (the Sami were formerly known as Lapps which means 'a
patch of cloth for mending' -...
