Tatham Mound - Softcover

Anthony, Piers

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0380713098 ISBN 13: 9780380713097

Publisher: Avon Books, 1992

Synopsis

Sent by the spirits, Hotfoot, a native American prophet, travels among the various tribes of North America to deliver his people from the devastation that awaits them

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Anthony, author of innumerable bestselling light fantasies, weighs in with a more seriously intended Native American/Spanish Conquest saga based on excavations made at Florida's Tatham Mound. During a raid on an enemy tribe, young warrior Throat Shot takes an arrow in the shoulder and falls unconscious on the ancient Toco tribal burial mound. The powerful spirit Dead Eagle saves his life, takes away his fear, and orders him to search for a magic crystal that will avert a future danger from the East. Throat Shot, who has a knack for languages, wanders far and wide as a trader's interpreter, learning songs and stories as he goes. After various adventures, and renamed Tale Teller, he marries a widow and her daughter. The spirits urge Tale Teller to continue with his quest, but he ignores them--and soon his family is wiped out by a mysterious disease. In his grief, Tale Teller renounces the spirits and his quest. Later, following another marriage and more children, he will be captured and enslaved by Hernando de Soto's brutal Conquistadors, and only after many more adventures and great hardships will Tale Teller escape, be reconciled with Dead Eagle, and finally join his wives and children in the spirit world. An interesting idea, but Anthony's dull, flat, uninvolving narrative--despite bolstering by Native tales and myths, and long descriptions of ceremonials and rituals--displays little real insight and offers, at best, average appeal. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Anthony, best known for his science fiction (the Xanth series), has based this overburdened saga on early 16th-century artifacts found in an actual North Florida Indian burial mound. Combining myth, fantasy and history, this wide-ranging, picaresque adventure follows the 15-year quest of a young 16th-century Florida Indian, Throat Shot. He has been instructed by spirits of a burial site to save his tribe from a terrible danger by finding the Ulunsuti, a great transparent crystal on the forehead of a snake. The spirits vow to guide him. Throat Shot gamely sets out, encountering a series of colorful traveling companions who either regale him with their own unique stories or pull him into one risky escapade after another. He meets, for example, descendants of Mayan royalty; he escapes Aztecs bent on extracting his heart. The numerous extraneous narratives slow an already leisurely pace, but the book is yet more seriously marred by the ubiquitous bland tone blanketing every description from that of a smallpox epidemic to that of the encounter with the ultimate enemy, the greedy and arrogant Spanish invaders.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Avon Books
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0380713098
• ISBN 13: 9780380713097
• Binding: Paperback