AMAZON

Walker, the author of books like The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets and Women's Rituals, was clearly the writer to undertake this anomalous little novel, which tells the story of a young warrior from an Amazon tribe living near the Black Sea circa 300 B.C. As such, Antiope does what's expected of her: After making her first kill (a Greek), she retreats to the womb cave for a ritual cleansing and rebirth (the last time she went subterranean was after her first ``moonblood''). But instead of waking up ready to pick her own ``child begetter'' and start a clan, she comes to on the shoulder of a California freeway naked and encircled by a gang of boys, whom she smites with her sword—but not before she gets a bullet in the thigh. To her rescue comes Diana, a divorced journalist who buys Antiope's story and teaches her to speak English and shop at the grocery store, though she's forced to remind her charge ``not to touch your genitals in the presence of other people. It would not be understood.'' Diana ultimately writes a book about Antiope, and it becomes a hit—resulting in a talk- show appearance and all sorts of occasions for Antiope to comment on society's spiritual impoverishment, clearly a result of ``the culture's loss of the Mother image,'' or so Antiope ruminates. In the end, she finds a time warp back to the womb cave, but not before saving a contemporary temple to the Goddess from a dynamiting, and slicing up a Jesus freak to boot. Religio-feminist diatribes veiled by a very thin fiction. For initiates only.