People of the Longhouse

People of the Longhouse (North America's Forgotten Past) by W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear, 2010; 416 pages. Published by Forge Books. Source: For review from Babs of PR by the Book.

Born in a time of violent upheaval, young Odion and his little sister, Tutelo, live in fear that one day Yellowtail Village will be attacked. When that day comes and Odion and Tutelo are marched away as slaves, Odion's only hope is that his parents are tracking them, coming to rescue them.
They are. But War Chief Koracoo and Deputy Gonda think they are tracking an ordinary war party herding captive women and children to an enemy village. Instead, they are following close on the heels of legendary evil, an old witch-woman named Gannajero, who captures children for her own purposes….

People of the Longhouse just completely blew me away. I was so swept up in the story that I totally forgot to take any notes at all; it was just impossible for me to put down.

I'm one of those people that can easily lose them self in a story that isn't set in modern times, especially with one so well written as People of the Longhouse was.
The authors did one brilliant job bringing to life the Native American culture and creating a story and characters that had me rapidly turning the pages so that I could find out if they were going to be able to save all the children that were taking as slaves.

In my opinion, the best thing about People of the Longhouse would have to be all the different plot lines that were running throughout the whole story, and how the narrative was told alternately from the perspective of War Chief Koracoo and Gonda (plus the two companions they ended paired up with), along with Odion their son. Why, because as you flipped from the danger and terror that Odion and all the children were facing to reading about the tension between their parents as they struggle with their feelings of guilt over them being taken. In short, this is one nail biting book.

Definitely the hardest thing to reading about in this book would have to be how mistreated the children were (I'll cover this when I post the content rating for this book on Rating Reads). While they were treated horribly as Gannajero's slaves, the authors didn't graphically cover most of the mistreatment of the children. While it might wasn't graphically covered, it also wasn't glossed over so you still read/felt the horror that the children suffered through.

Final Verdict: Although I have never read (to my knowledge) a fiction based book on Native Americans I would highly recommend this to all historical book lovers because the writing in People of the Longhouse is just amazing..

People of the Longhouse earns 5 out of 5 pineapples.