Circles of Stone
 Joan Dahr Lambert
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 1999 Pocket Books
 ISBN: 0671552864

An epic saga of prehistoric life & death, suffering & joy & the slow, miraculous relationship between creatures becoming people & people holding to their faith in the Sacred Mother.

This was such a primal read, as if I'd dreamt it at sometime in my life or the way we feel for the dinosaurs without actually ever having been alive at the same time they enjoyed this world. I know when I too first saw those footmarks upon that ancient lava bed, I had such a rush of connection. In A Natural History of the Senses Diane Ackerman illustrates one of her Senses with this profound discovery of what we've dubbed: Lucy's footprints.

To women this memory is intense, startling & bone-deep. For women can see, especially during gestation, that long, long walk we've made out of the water, the cave & the trees. It did, of course, take a woman to bring these stories to the page & a woman trained in the evolution of human sexuality brings with her a perspective that opens up unthought-of concepts. Joan Dahr Lambert is a Mistress Story Teller & has done a wonderful & wonder-filled job.

I know, from living beside a modern-day hunter & warrior, that a lot of what's in Circles of Stone would be scoffed at; great guffaws about the improbability of certain events; exclamations of drivel about women romanticising those early millennia when we crept out of the forest, taught ourselves to stand upright which changed our reproductive cycles forever.

Not only did we survive, we thrived & that is what Joan Dahr Lambert's book is all about: how we might have done it. I will say this, this interpretation is as valid as any put forth by any man. While men write great future space operas, reburnishing their old chestnuts of honor, duty & courage, they still hav'n't figured out how we did it. How, with all their manly mayhem of rape, plunder, gendercide & infanticide, we survived. How the despised, silly, weaker sex, saddled with keeping the flame of life alive, must have figured something out & done it right.

Circles of Stone is in the genre that is the female answer to the male Star Wars mythology. It brought up a lot of stuff, ancient & modern, made me expand my parameters again, drew me further out into the open, made me look at how our experience of the Sacred could have come about; gave me some alternate hystorical stories.

Circles of Stone is a keeper, up there on your Women's Journey Shelf right along with the Descent of Woman; Clan of the Cave Bear & all those grand adventures that women have written about to return to us our sense of our story, our sense of celebration of a life well lived & our sense of the Sacred Mother.

Circles of Stone reminds me of reading about Camelot - you know how it's going to end. Everyone knows about our written history, anyone can devote their life to reading intimate chronicles or broad overviews of an era, an age, an epoch. It takes someone with a special & keen ability to tell the oral stories that disappeared into the ether after the last woman spoke.

Joan Dahr Lambert gifts us with some hope in a book of beautiful scenes, awe-inspiring experiences of wild & tempestuous weather; of life before all the trappings with which civilization has weighed us down, incarcerated us & made us unkind.

I'm glad Joan Dahr Lambert is working on her next novel, very well done!
(07/11/99)

Rebecca