It is 1555 and Spanish ships are raiding the coast of what is now Georgia and Florida. Calling Crow, chief of a Muskogee village, is captured and taken to Hispaniola as a slave. So begins an action-packed series of adventures in which he survives disease, hurricanes, slavery, alligators, and the plots of his enemies — French, Spanish and Indian alike.

As well as telling an exciting tale, Clayton does a great job with the history, managing to switch between cultural contexts without jarring and avoiding the romanticisation to which his subject would easily have lent itself. But the pace of his narrative is a little too frenetic, leaving less room for development of setting and characters than I would have liked. Though the story spans many years, for example, we never get a feel for the passing of time, and the near-continuous excitement swamps any kind of narrative dynamics. Calling Crow is first-rate adventure fiction; in many ways its success as such limits its potential as a historical novel.

September 1996

External links:

Calling Crow
- buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk
Flight of the Crow
- buy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Related reviews:

- books about the United States + American history
- more historical fiction