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The things which flesh out the feeling of this culture
-Sayings & bromides
-Closeness to animals, even sexually
-Gender roles
-Neandarthal encounters portrayed from both POVs

The power sharing by the gender is described:
Thorn points out that sexual violence is the dumbest misdeed the young braggart could have committed.
"If she tells the other women what you did you are a dead man. So you better do everything she says. Forever. Or leave the tribe. In which case, again, you're a dead man."

test test test

I've been tempted to say this is fluff because it is such easy reading, but we are definitely also in the territory of John Irving and Richard Russo, if not Jonathan Lethem.

Greenland's word choice sends me to the dictionary about once every 5 pages.

The Seder scene! Best/worst Seder ever.

16 of the 29 major characters come together for a super funny scene like a Shakespearean comedy -- right before everything flips and there's a gigantic plot twist.

The 1950s racism is part outrageous and part eye-opening to my white self.

The character is a reader of Lovecraft. And the book is written with a Lovecraftian plotline: pulpy, thrilling, sort of noir sort of supernatural.

The Adobe Alliance: Simone Swan learned mud dome construction in Egypt from Hassan Fathy, author of Architecture for the poor.

In TX Presidio and Ojinaga she built her proof of concept, a home for $9 per square foot.

Pages 30 - 100 were gripping: Tahiti and Tierra del Fuego!
First Maori encounter good stuff too. The Maori did the Kapa Haka intimidation dance in his face during the first encounter.
Now he's mapping New Zealand and it is tedious, which I guess is realistic.

Pathos + satire.
Disorienting.
Page turner.
Recommended if you like:
Kurt Vonnegut
Dave Chapelle
Mark Twain
Bob Dylan

In the first 100 pages there's a sad event and a very sad event.

Raymond Carver (Cathedral) is good stuff, where a man deals with his jealousy about his wife having a male friend.

Susan Sontag with longterm illness of her friend. Cynthia Ozick, WWII sadness.

Peter Taylor, The Old Forest: masterful layer by layer revealing of an incident and the reader's gradual shift in understanding that event. Some resonance with themes of Jane Austen.

Chapters 12 and 13 switch into extreme comedy. Dont skip ahead to them though, because they won't be funny without the set-up.

Haslett builds characters that are real-world complicated, lets you ponder what's appealing about them, and then compromises a few until they are sort of villainish. And then, THEN introduces some of the coolest heroic moments I've ever read. And the heroism is displayed in realistic situations any of us could face.

The heroes (quotidian) journey: Haslett portrays what heroism would look like in your own life.

Reads out loud well, so it's well crafted, down on the sentence by sentence scale.
And I see things when I re-read it. I just read Chapter 5 twice.

Dave Eggers talked up Edith Wharton a lot. I'm on p. 80 and EW lives up to the hype.

p. 165 of 397
Disappointed: it is turning into long stretches of running, fighting, begging for their lives. Simple adventure stuff. The author anticipated Maldivas/Falklands War.

The paragraphs and sentences are beautiful to read out loud.

Shakespeare would say: "I will wring your heart if it be made of penetrable stuff."

Reminds me of Denis Johnson and of the later Shakespeare tragedies so far.

The events described c. 1962 are divergent from the Wikipedia article under "Tutsi", especially the subsection of that article
Independence of Rwanda and Burundi (1962).
I read on with great interest.

The book is very good so far. It is in a genre with Long Way Home.