It's an Anne Bishop novel with no sex. If you don't know what you're getting into with one of those, this is not the right place to start.
I have started every review of the books in this series this way and everything I've said up until now still holds true. But I want to turn from Bishop's handling of gender politics for a moment.
I'm four books into this series and I STILL can't tell whether it's a brilliant examination of imperialism or racist.
I think it might be accidentally both.
Here's the thing - the terra indigene are very clearly modeled on indigenous peoples, right down to the name. They also draw on the animal and shape shifter legends of indigenous people. They are under attack by the inhabitants of Europe Cel-Romano and the introduction that accompanies every book in the damn series recapitulates the first contact.
BUT, and it's a big one, the terra indigene are a fantasy of power. The shifters, the Elders, the ACTUAL OCEAN are the terra indigene. Humans are always here on sufferance. Unlike the Imperialist fantasy of dominance, this is the fantasy where the only humans allowed to stay are those who can learn to live in harmony, who can cooperate with those unlike themselves, who can submit to the strictures of living with the land and its stronger inhabitants. The narrative still turns on the fulcrum of power and dominance, but this time it's Nature's order, rather than human imposed might-makes-right, and while nature can be both altruistic and cruel, it is not duplicitous and that makes it better than humans.
The Others is basically the story of what would have happened had humans been forced to reckon with power in their attempts to conquer and subdue the world. The group Humans First and Last consistently gets what is coming to it and the moral is that those who put in-group survival above helping others and cooperation deserve all of what nature red in tooth and claw can do.
Here's the second but. The terra indigene don't stand for indigenous people. They replace them. So, first of all, the pristine Americas is itself an imperialist white fantasy and is problematic in pretending indigenous people never lived here. And second, if you read the terra indigene as stand-ins for the indigenous inhabitants rather than the mark of their erasure, then Bishop is playing into their dehumanization by, quite literally, making them animals (some of the time). Also a problematic imperialist trope.
At the end of the day, our sordid history is things that Europeans did to other humans. And while this series, told predominantly from the point of view of non-humans, manages to defamiliarize the human experience by making our priorities and attitudes look weird, it also relies on native erasure and dehumanization to do so.
Bishop also combines "city-folk are evil" and "anyone intolerant deserves to die" into the same story and I have to love her for it.