With everyone from the first book cast back in time, we digress from the Columbus storyline to follow Tawny Ramirez as she searches for her twin children in the last ice age. Tens of thousands of years before Columbus she finds herself in trouble with the indigenous people of the time and needing to fend off an invasion of North America's Atlantic coast by the Solutrean people of Europe.

I really like the emotional core of this series, even if the story is hard to follow from page to page at times.

It doesn't help that three different artists pitch in to draw the four issues collected here. They are all okay, but this story really needs a single illustrator with a strong vision to deliver on what Stephen Graham Jones is laying down. I'm curious what his scripts look like and wonder if he'd consider adapting this series as a novel when it is done.

FOR REFERENCE:

Contents:
• Chapter One. Tawny / Riccardo Burchielli, artist
• Chapter Two. You Want a Death Ritual? / Riccardo Burchielli, artist
• Chapter Three. Strong Enough Medicine / Riccardo Burchielli and Patricio Delpeche, artists
• Chapter Four. The Last Special Place / Emily Schnall, artist
• Covers / Rafael Albuquerque, Angel Hernandez, Sam Lotfi, Patricio Delpeche, Ibraham Moustafa, artists
• About the Creators ( )

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through NetGalley. Content warning for racist violence. Caution: this review contains spoilers.)

-- 3.5 stars --

In 2112 A.D., four friends run into a magical cave, in search of Tawny and Martin's missing twins. Tawny emerges alone on the other side, in 20,000 B.C.E. Armed only with her knowledge of the Ice Age, Tawny must brave the Indigenous Americans (who may or may not see her as an ally), invading Solutreans, and all manner of megafauna to stay alive - at least long enough to find and rescue Yazzie and Hochunk.

ICE AGE is an interesting interlude between Volumes 1 and 3 of EARTHDIVERS - when Emily will presumably appear just in time to witness America's birth in 1776 (if Ben Franklin's eyeglasses are any indication. But who gave them to her!?!) At just four single issues, it runs a little shorter than the others, but Graham Jones manages to pack a lot into just 104 pages.

The Solutrean Hypothesis "posits that around 21,000 years ago a group of people from the Solutré region of France, who are historically characterized by their unique lithic technique, migrated to North America along pack ice in the Atlantic Ocean. Once they made it to North America, their lithic technique dispersed around the continent (c. 13,000 years ago) to provide the basis for the later popularization of Clovis lithic technology." (Thanks, Wikipedia.)

In this rendition, the Solutreans are French invaders who immediately massacre the Indigenous American they encounter. Like Tad in KILL COLUMBUS, Tawny has to find a way to divert the European interlopers, this time to guarantee her ancestors the 20,000+ years of freedom history promised them. All while protecting an injured Solutrean child (she is a mom, after all), finding her own kids, and leaving the timeline unaltered.

The ICE AGE story is engaging, though I did sometimes have trouble following the action. In the last issue, there's an abrupt jump to the present day (well, 2112), and that's where I really lost the plot. It seemed like we saw Yellow Kidney, then a lowly tech, kill an astronaut, steal his identity, and assume his place aboard one of the departing space shuttles. But if this is the case, how is he down on Earth, in Arizona, convincing everyone else to risk their lives for the future? I am so confused (but also very much looking forward to Volume 3). ( )