Tatham Mound - Hardcover

Anthony, Piers

3.73

712 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688101402 ISBN 13: 9780688101404

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1991

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Florida Indian warrior Tale Teller, who possesses the gift of languages, embarks on a mission to unite the tribes of Florida and Central America against de Soto and the invading Conquistadores

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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.

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