SOURCE: Kamine, Mark. “A Prehistoric Tale.” New Leader (20 March 1989): 20–21.

In the following review, Kamine offers a positive assessment of The Gift of Stones.

Jim Crace has written a short novel about growing up in a prehistoric village—a Stone Age Bildungsroman. This is less odd than it sounds given the settings of the stories in his first book, an award-winner in his native England, entitled Continent. Equal parts mock anthropology, V. S. Naipaul and Jorge Luis Borges, it pitted primitive societies against modern ones with good ironic effect.

The Gift of Stones drops the modern as well as most of the irony. While the contrast is missed, the author demonstrates that a vividly imagined, artfully rendered primitiveness is enough. The novel's hero is the village storyteller, its narrator his adoptive daughter (who has adopted him and his role.) She quotes from and paraphrases her father, and occasionally fills...