I feel that this is a book that introverts will love - not so much for extroverts, though, as they wouldn't really enjoy the soul-searching the main character, Evelyn, continuously does.At the start of the book, Evelyn, her husband, Tom, and their five year old son, Teddy, are on a journey from Alaska, where Evelyn was born and raised, and where they live in their own log cabin, to go to Tom's family home in Washington, so that Tom can help out on the family farm, due to his brother-in-law's sho...

This is a difficult book for me to rate. As a big fan of 'Robin Hobb' novels, I've been looking forward to reading something with Megan Lindholm's name on it. 'Cloven Hooves' seemed thematically right down my alley, and in many ways it did not disappoint.The author is a master at frustrating the reader by putting the protagonist through one injustice after another. Unlike works by Hobb, these injustices take place in the most mundane, domestic of settings. Be prepared to read a lot about cleanin...

A SHELVING CONUNDRUM!Literary Shelf?This is a story of a woman out of sorts with herself and with the world around her. The depth of characterization and the high quality of the writing are incredibly impressive. All of her fears, her pride, her self-loathing, her idiosyncrasies, her need to be alone and in nature, her inability to relate to other human beings let alone mainstream society... all there, on the page, and explored with subtlety and compassion by an author who understands. The novel...

Aspects of this book reminded me of both Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye andPatricia McKillip's Stepping from the Shadows. All three books seem ratherautobiographical in some respects (although certainly not others).In Cloven Hooves, a girl, growing up in wild Alaskan countryside,independent but rather neglected, has as her playmate a faun, whom she(rather unoriginally) calls Pan. When she gets older, she convincesherself that this was an 'imaginary playmate' and struggles to 'fit in' tosociety. She...

Absolutely loved this book. It's impossible fantasy grounded in reality, if that makes any sense. That is, it's not a romp in faerie, or a quest for the magic sword. It starts out very mundane, and then slides into the impossible. It has a powerful female character, which I like, too.

Ugh, not even the promise of satyr sex is enlivening this dreary af dated af read. When will I learn that there are only three American writers who don’t bore the hell out of me?

I read this book super fast. There are lengths at times and the main character is a little bit whiny but that's the all point. She's special as well as being lost in her life. The fantasy part is raw and primal. The story goes where i didn't expect it to go. It was quite an experiment.

Was going to give this an added star simply because I can see what the author was trying to do and up to a certain point I think she achieved it, but my own experience reading this book simply cannot let me give it anything above one without feeling like it'd be disingenous. From never fully being able to connect to the protagonist, to never quite buying any of the character dynamics in the book, to sentences that simply never aged well to sickening detailed descriptions of killing and maiming a...

Why do I always forget that Lindholm's stories have this amazing capacity to turn vividly bitter?

A story about unnerving characters and a strange relationship with a faun, told through long descriptions full of nature, snow and boring things.Tom is needed by his family, so Evelyn and their boy go with him to live on the parents' property. Evelyn has a very hard time to adjust, they don't want her at the farm so all she does all day is cleaning the little house. When she was young, she had a special friend: a faun. And it seems that once again, he's around.As usual, Megan knew where she want...

Where do I start with this ... It's like if furry porn met a critique of 'young women today' and had a slow, boring baby. The main character is the least interesting thing about this book. The most interesting is probably how a writer of Hobb/Lindholm's caliber manages to do the 'wicked inlaws' trope with such clumsy obviousness it's almost didactic. I stopped before MC inevitably banged the goat, but sadly, not before the 100th (felt like) description of husband Tom's bare-chested handsomeness....

A wise and subtle book about what it's like to grow up female in our world, and one of those rare books that gains a new layer of depth upon every rereading.

At the same time - June 2020 - as this re-issue of 'Le Dieu dans l'ombre', the English edition 'Cloven Hooves' was republished. The French title can be translated as 'The God in the Shadows'. It's a fantastic story about an introvert married woman, mother of Teddy, a five-year old boy. The little family, with husband Tom(my) as an equivalent of Brad Pitt (or so the descriptions told me), live in Fairbanks, Alaska. As it goes with Americans, they don't always live near their parents, but move to

people! if you have this book... hold onto it. It's out of print and very hard to find. - If you didn't like it, you can probably make a sale off of it.That said - this is one of my favorite books. I'm hoping that it is still in my old room at my Father's house, because I sure would love to read it again.

Couldn't even make it past 100 pages. The main character is whiny and annoying, highly focused on needing the men in her life to define her (despite trying to insist otherwise), and there is very little in the way of story progression even a third of the way through the book.

Mesmerizing! I still have the worn paperback, one of the books I will read again.

Cloven Hooves is out of print and hard to find. That said, as a huge Robin Hobb fan, I set out to find this book. I managed to get a beat up paperback from thriftbooks.com. It is with almost a lackluster heart, this reader can only give the story 3 stars. On the other hand, it was not the writing that was bad, far from it. It just made me Sad and Mad. Megan Lindholm writes a fanciful, lyrical novel with beautiful poetic paragraphs of both Alaskan and Washington's wilderness, sensual passages of

There are books, and then there are books by Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm. These books do not easily let me leave their world, they insinuate themselves into my waking world and change my thoughts and feelings. They are always at the edge of my mind, calling for me to return to them and follow the story.This one is admittedly weird and uncomfortable at times - a woman falls in love with a satyr. Yet Hobb's skill is such that she makes it all unfold naturally, so that no other path is ever more clea...

There's no such thing as a bad Robin Hobb or Megan Lindholm book in my opinion. Both of this author's incarnations/styles are always, dedicated to the humane and adventurously exciting. I think the Lindholm books have a more modest sensibility- but they're always amazingly original with a bit more of the funkiness of humanity.I'm only singling out Lindholm's "Cloven Hooves" because it works so beautifully as both an erotically-tinged fantasy and a wicked and unexpected satire. I can't imagine wh...

Well this was fairly disappointing. Up until now I have enjoyed every Robin Hobb/Megan Lindholm novel. This book had very good character development and great depiction of the protagonists interaction with nature, nevertheless it didn't mitigate the fact that the conflict was quite bland and failed to capture my attention while reading. I do concede I am not the target audience for this novel, regardless I do not think this is a book I would recommend to anyone any time soon.