This story begins with the Tribute Collector and his niece. That tribe consumes the goods of smaller tribes on that tributary and using those men as builders of the Mounds - large buildings. With little written history, she grabs the reader into a plausible story that of a great tribe along the Ohio River. You can tell by the way the history into the prose is not opaque, but gently hidden in the native's conversations. Saadia's native American series are enjoyable because she puts in extensive research into them. 'Shadow on the Sun' is a good story, interesting from both historical and fictional aspects, a page-turner, and I only hope that the rest of the series will measure to such an ambitious beginning.

The ‘villager’ Iciwata is wild and very high-spirited, self-centered most of the time, a local bully one might say, stuck in a 'pond' that was too shallow for him, but when the tribute collector from the ‘proper’ Mississippian city arrives, he finds himself completely out of his depth, and from that moment on the story, fast-paced as it was from the beginning, launches into a complete whirlwind of action and adventure, and twists and turns on every corner, culminating in a dramatic sun eclipse that according to the afterword indeed happened and is mention in the NASA records. The Cahokians were the last of the mound builders, and the greatest, but in this novel one of the two main protagonists is coming from the more ancient and less prominent culture down the Ohio river, people worshiped ancestral mounds but did not know how to erect ones. For one, this novel covers what the author’s afterword claims to be several different mound building periods, from completely different areas and times. About the Mound Builders of Mississippi and Ohio rivers I knew practically nothing, and I admit I will need to read more books to grasp this lost civilization better.

Shadow on the Sun by Zoe Saadia