This author clearly knows her setting

[conuly]

It's obviously Appalachia, and judging from her bio I'm guessing it's specifically the Great Smoky Mountains. A post-Columbian exchange Appalachia, with domestic Eurasian livestock and introduced, naturalized Eurasian flora such as dandelions, mullein, and rosemary. (And it looks like no American Chestnuts, but maybe they just haven't bumped into any.)

Which would be fine, except it's pretty jarring when the described society is a pre-gunpowder Standard European Fantasyland where everybody mostly lives in the same places that they've lived in for the past thousand or more generations, universally ruled over by hereditary monarchs. There don't appear to be displaced Native Americans, but then, there also don't appear to be Roma or Jews.

Setting: 5 stars, feels like you're there
General worldbuilding: it wouldn't clash so badly if the setting wasn't so great

Comments

[nodrog]

Maybe there's a land bridge to Europe…?

Or a LOT of Bronze-Age trans-Atlantic commerce, back when the Mexicans were encountering the “bearded white men from beyond the ocean horizon” they still remembered when the Spaniards showed up.

(Grr…  Y’ know, one bead of Egyptian faience found in a British passage grave proved commerce to exist across that vast distance.  All we would need is to find one (1) bronze artifact, anything, in a Toltec or Olmec tomb.  Please.)

[sallymn]

It's sometimes very hard not to imagine every fictional landscape - even your own- as the place you know. There's a book - Peter Mendelsund's What We See When We Read - that goes into that from the reader POV, and I guess for some writers it happens to, then when someone who knows the area they're visualising reads it... it gets caught.

[conuly]

Sometime lack of proof really is proof of lack. Lots of people have stories about big worldwide floods, but that doesn't mean there was ever one.

[conuly]

Well, in the next book they visit New Orleans, and the bad guys are evangelicists from the Mayintecs to the south (a writing choice I raised an eyebrow to, considering), so I don't think she accidentally set the book here.

I do wonder if she considered the implications of all that sorgum and apple cider, though. Their Bayou also happens to be filled with African-Americans (well... you know...) and, just like the white folks and the apples I ask where did they come from?

[mindstalk]

Geology and biology are hard. I don't blame an author for deciding to lift something familiar and filling it with whomever. And if it's fantasyland then getting hung up on evolution seems unnecessary.

Your other comment is a bit more eyebrow-raising, but I dunno.

[nodrog]

But where there’s smoke there’s fire, and as we dig farther into it the past constantly gets bigger and busier.  We may not yet have hard artifact evidence, but the smoke in this case is hard to ignore:  The bearded white men had returned as they’d said they would.  Oops…  Plus the presence of cotton in both Old and New Worlds is hard to otherwise explain.

As for floods, define “world.”  You better believe Mesopotamia flooded - it’s all mud flats, not a stone to be found, a land created by flooding.  If “world” means “as far as the eye can see, to the uttermost horizon,” one hard winter rain could spread mud-brick-obliterating silt-brown water across the entire world by definition.

[sallymn]

Umm.... that's taking it rather too far, true, and would be very distracting???

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Sounds like the author knows and loves her own home's natural environment, but isn't really conscious of the overwhelming impact of six centuries of destruction of native species and introduction of non-native species, all consequences of the European invasion. The eco-systems of this continent would have been unimaginably different if that invasion had never taken place.

*sigh* Sad to think of how exquisite this whole planet would be, if only the damned apes hadn't started setting shit on fire. If I ever get hold of a TARDIS, we'll see about that. (The fact that we're all still here shows that I never WILL get hold of a TARDIS, but oh well. We know what the Vulcan Science Academy would say.)

[conuly]

Well, she's a park ranger in her other life. I think she must know. Maybe not about dandelion, that's so sufficiently naturalized that many people might not realize, but certainly about the domesticated fauna.

And if we want to complain about the destruction of native flora and fauna, we've got to go right back to the beginning - as near as I can tell, as soon as humans started walking upright and, as you say, making fires they began systematically exterminating all the megafauna they could find and then some.

We know what the Vulcan Science Academy would say.</i. I think they're just being stubborn because time travel is really headache-inducing.