A time-slip story, in which 11 year-old Esther, a bi-lingual Chicana in Texas, who is interested in archeology, finds herself somehow in the time of the Clovis people, of whom little is known today except for their spearheads (called "Clovis points.")

The people she finds and lives with for several months think she has come from the stars and has supernatural powers, especially after she saves a little girl's life, using the Heimlich Maneuver. They live in small nomadic groups, hunt mammoths and bison, and feast enormously when there is food, since they have no way to preserve meat.

Like the Jean Auel's Cave Bear clan, some dislike Esther for her differences, especially when she tells them that someday the mammoths will be extinct. They worry too about climatic changes that are taking place. Their shamans, however, try to use their dreaming to help her to find a passage back "to the stars."

When she does return, of course, only one of the archeologists believe her story, and that one says that she can't public admit belief and keep on being accepted as a scientist!

A nice story for older children with an interest in prehistoric times.

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