booksandcoffeerequired 's review for:

The Last Neanderthal by Claire Cameron

4.0

---

Ever since I was a little kid flipping through my grandma’s National Geographic collection, I’ve been intrigued by the lives of the people of the Neolithic- How did they live? What did they wear? What were their family structures? And, maybe most important to the human mind and the scientific world, how similar were they to us? Well, if you’ve ever sparked an interest in any of those questions , The Last Neanderthal will help give you a fictionalized version to these answers, one that will leave you thinking days after you’ve read the last page. Cameron interweaves the story of both protagonists, a Neanderthal, Girl, and an archaeologist, Rosamund Gale, as both go looking for answers to their own questions: Who am I? What does family mean to me, and motherhood, too? What about motherhood and a career when the two are so little valued in our society as two proponents of ones life, not separate things? And maybe the biggest question for both protagonists: what gives me my sense of self? As Rosamund digs up Girl’s bones, we learn more and more about her own personal problems as well as Girl’s, and how each connect and disconnect in their own ways - around their life goals, around motherhood, around survival in a world that doesn’t know what to do with either. This book surprised me with how much I enjoyed it, as well as got out of it, and I’d love to see more fiction books of this type that analyze science in a way that is more accessible. As the stories of both women build up into their climaxes, the writing leaves one on the edge of their seat, desperate to see what has happened to either of the two - and the ending was fantastic in its questioning of the human and the Neanderthal soul.