Inspired by the vitality of Paleolithic cave paintings in the Cantabria region of Northern Spain, Kathleeen Flanagan Rollins continues her series of stories about early humans in the process of discovering their environment and themselves from a distance of 14,000 years. While Rollins uses scholarly inquiry into the behaviors of early humans to form her characters, they also possess individual personalities that readers will recognize in both earlier and modern humans. This fourth volume of the author’s Misfits and Heroes series draws readers into a world they will both recognize and marvel at.

Rollins’ tale begins with the death of Breygan, who died a morally-bankrupt chief, was refused entry into the afterlife by its spiritual guardians and was sent back to earth to learn how to live meaningfully and caringly with others. As characters remind each other, the world of A FAMILY OF STRANGERS is a place where the barriers between the natural, realistic and spirit worlds are thin, at times to the point of transparency.  Those exploring the painted caves experience the intense presence of animal spirits and an overarching cycle of life governing both humans and all other living creatures.

Rollins’ descriptive abilities stress sensation; people learn about the world around them in scent, sound and touch. Intuition, second-sight and dreams all serve as potential guides for human explorers. Lines blur between life-forms, as the central character, Breygan, grows to young adulthood parented wolves, and a red deer appears periodically to offer warnings, encouragement and mysterious signs of hope. Even lines between life and death are fluid. Characters disappear and reappear, and it is not always clear who has died.

The most challenging aspect of telling a historically-based tale is keeping human perceptions within the psychological possibilities of the time (Brutus’s reasons for killing Julius Caesar could be framed in several ways, but none of them Freudian). With occasional exceptions, Rollins keeps her characters’ points of view within plausible bounds. The world inhabited by A FAMILY OF STRANGERS is a violent and dangerous place. The challenge for human explorers in an unfamiliar and often inhospitable environment is unrelenting, requiring courage and risk-taking to survive. Characters often slip and fall, physically as well as in other ways, but Rollins has found a sure-footed way to tell her story of early times and their inhabitants.

~Janet Beal for Indie Reader