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opanda 's review for:
The Last Neanderthal
by Claire Cameron
I had really high hopes for this book and I definitely didn’t hate it but it really didn’t live up to expectations. First of all, I don’t really know anything about Neanderthals but the way that they were able to smell and sense other Neanderthals and animals from so far away and share dreams with each other seemed a little fantastical and sometimes I forgot that I wasn’t reading about a superhero. I also thought the language that the author created for them was a little annoying. Why did they use combinations of different English words?? I think the author would have been better off using made up “nonsense words” rather than making them speak a weird version of English. Because of this, the glossary in the beginning was super unnecessary because we can kind of figure out what the words are supposed to mean by ourselves and if we can’t, there’s an explanation right there in the narrative. As for the present day timeline, I liked how it had so many parallels with the Neanderthal storyline and it really got across the message that humans and Neanderthals weren’t so different after all. However, I found the main character extremely irritating. All in all, this book did not fulfill my expectations of it but it did pique my interest and I’m about to go read about what we know of the Neanderthals and their lives.