Time Pebbles

By: Jerry Merritt

Narrated by: Emily Sutton-Smith

Tekla, son of an ancient shaman, loses Ka Li when she is torn from his life by a brutal tribe of Denisovans in a Late Pleistocene kidnapping.

Ka Li escapes but is unarmed and forced to flee across the Bering land bridge where she becomes hopelessly lost in the endless tracts of North America. Only Tekla cares enough to search for her over the years. As Ka Li survives fierce predators and scarce resources, she leaves behind a series of signal cairns to help Tekla find her.

Skipping forward 60,000 years, Helen Ryland, a mid-20th century archaeologist, unearths one of Ka Li’s surviving signal cairns and realizes she has found trace of people who populated the Americas even before the Clovis culture. Helen’s detective work tracking Ka Li’s timeless signals across the Alaskan wilderness now intertwines with Ka Li’s story. As Helen solves the puzzle of the signal cairns she finds universal fame and suffers devastating misfortune. In the end, Helen discovers that science in isolation cannot answer all of her questions for Tekla’s devotion to Ka Li had not died even though 600 centuries had passed.

©2014 Jerry Merritt (P)2018 Podium Publishing

Superb StoryTelling

Loved the concept and its implementation... Gotta say though, not really SF, more historical fiction adventure, unless you consider anthropology and paleontology SF... The back and forth chronologically is seamlessly done, and uber enjoyed the early scientific advances... Has some serious power and poignancy, and keeps you hooked w/ the interweaved story arcs... However, the narration was pretty bland and detracted a bit... It’s a professional job, but has no feeling... 1.25 too slow and 1.5 a touch too quick... Overall an excellent story, better than average audio book, due to only average performance...

Good read

Interesting story, very timely also with old fossils being found in the news, spring of 2018.

Interesting for the historical anthropology

After thoroughly enjoying A Gift of Time by Jerry Merritt, I was excited to give Time Pebbles a try. I loved the story and the anthropological info in it. The parallel stories weave nicely with each other, although the dialogue between the students felt a bit contrived. (Having been on a few undergrad digs, I never heard conversations like those described in TP.) There are two interesting stories here, but the performance does not convey it. It was all I could do to keep pep-talking myself through listening. Vocally, the reader was unable to tell a story in any sort of compelling way. The stilted, over-enunciated, artificial delivery is reminiscent of an android, or Siri reading a novel. I'm nearly done with the book and I have no idea who these characters are. There are several exciting events in the book, but I have no idea when they're happening based on the reader's delivery. I love reader performances that paint a picture, that make me feel as if I know the main characters. This performance failed to do that.

Fantastic story!

Wow! That was such a wonderful story! The narration was great also. The end caught me totally by surprise!

Great character development, excellent performance, solid (prehistory) story.

I really did not enjoy the complete patheticness of the female character. Her " I need a man and I'm going to grasp onto every single word every man says to me hoping and praying that they will love me but realizing that nobody would ever love somebody as menial and useless as me" sad sob story kind of made me sick to my stomach. I think it very much detracted from the whole story.