Where do I even start? In a tale that defies biology, geology, common sense and all belief, Jean M. Auel introduces us to a particularly disturbing self-insert in the form of Ayla, a Cro-Magnon girl who is raised by a tribe of doltish Neanderthals.

Not only is Ayla strong, beautiful (though she considers herself ugly and believes that nobody could ever love her) and talented, she's also a virtual genius. Over the course of the series she invents or discovers the spear thrower, basket-weaving, superior weapon-making, the sewing needle, surgical stitching, horseback riding, the bra, the domestication of animals, the travois, the use of flint and pyrite to start a fire, the concept of biological reproduction at a time when pregnancy is believed to be magic, and contraception. Give her a few more books and she'll probably be splitting the atom.

She's also possessed of a phenomenal memory, knows everything there is to know about medicinal herbs, learns an entire language in a single dream and is possibly psychic.

But if you enjoy this, you'll love the second book, where she finds her True Stu Love in Jondalar, a sexy angst-bucket of sexiness whose huge penis has always proved too intimidating for his sexual partners until Ayla comes along, at which point the series experiences a 1000% increase in bad caveman porn. I assume the two of them continue to travel the land, provoking wonder in all they meet (because anybody who doesn't adore Ayla on first sight is clearly a Bad Person).

Ayla may be one of the most annoying literary characters in existence.

This story follows Ayla, a Cro-Magnon girl living 35 000 years ago, who at the age of 5 loses her family in an earthquake and is found on the edge of death by a clan of Neanderthals.

Ayla is different to the Clan in the way she looks and thinks, but in order to survive must try to fit in with their ways and customs. She learns about their way of living, their religion and the way that they communicate.

Although many are wary of her, most accept her as she seems like a lucky omen.

But as she gets older and some of her differences become more apparent, she finds it more difficult to fit in.

This was a very interesting look at the earth's history and although the writing style wasn't the greatest, it was an entertaining story. I might even read the 2nd book if I come across it one day.

No llevaba grandes expectativas con este libro. Sin embargo me quedo con ganas de continuar la saga.

I really liked this book so much that I even acquired a copy, however, after reading it the first time, I felt deceived. Seeing as 150 people shelved this as "romance", I started it and expected you know, a love story. I assumed Broud would be her love interest since he was a main character and guessed he and Ayla would have an enemies-to-lovers plot line or something. He treated her really badly (understatement) but I let it go because I assumed he'd have to beg for her forgiveness (hero-groveling is a weakness of mine). I get to the second to last page (there are 512 in this book, so I had been waiting for quite some time) desperately anticipating the moment Broud realizes his love for Ayla (they say hate is like love, don't they?) and then what does he do? He attempts to murder her.

...

...

...

@#$%!!!

Seriously, people, I know the rest of this series focuses on romance, but this book does not, so please don't shelve it as such! It's misleading.

I'll never forget the first time I read this book. I was in the 5th grade. It was sitting around my house - my mom is an English teacher, so we always had plenty of books lying around in various stages of reading completion - and the synopsis on the back cover caught my attention. Some pretty advanced themes for a 5th grader, as my teacher Mr. Konezney mentioned to my mother upon seeing me read this book in school - but it was my very first emotional connection to fictional characters. Ayla, Creb, Brun - I remember them all. I sobbed at the end of the book, not just because it was emotional, but I remember the sadness that I would never again be able to read this book with new eyes. I read it several times afterwards, but I haven't picked it up in years. I wonder if it would hold up as well now, but I almost want to leave it as I remember it just in case. The other books in the series are fine, but not nearly as strong in my opinion. I've heard the movie is terrible, but then what would you expect from a movie starring Darryl Hannah?

Took me to a whole different era and I absolutely loved it. Now I see why this was my Mamas favorite series and wanted to read it again before she passed. Now I’m reading them

I *really* wanted to dig this book. I have a burgeoning obsession with prehistory, evolution, and the antecedents of man, and a tale of Cro Magnons and Neanderthals is exactly what I'd love to read.

Sadly, this book does not contain that tale.

Instead, it's a goopy mess of inane metaphysics, prurience for prurience's sake, and a none-too-subtle dollop of racism, as the blonde-haired and light-skinned heroine shows the more primitive (and darker-skinned) Neanderthals how to do--well, just about everything.

This is a white man's burden fantasy writ large, and not writ very well.

I first read this book many years ago, simply because it was in the small collection of books my father left behind when my parents split. Another girl I knew read them too, and between us we managed to track down the whole collection. Was this appropriate reading for a 12 year old? Probably not, but it fostered an interest in history that went on through my teens, and I sure learned a lot from the next few books about romance -coughcough-

At the time, it was probably among my favorite books and I have to say that fondness has stayed with me. It's only been tarnished by how much I HATED the final book, but enough time has passed since that horrible experience that I can read this without remembering. I am going to read at least the first four books in the next few weeks, because I can't wait to read the parts with Baby and Jondalar again. It was a stand out book then and it still is. Others have touched on this series with the same kind of setting or historical nod, but nothing beats this one.

A great book, and part of a great series. Always five stars! PS. I have left my original review on this as well, so the next part is that review.

I can't believe I haven't read this book in over six years, because it is one of my absolute favorites and I'm kind of disappointed in myself. :( This series with the exception of the last book, still remain in my absolute favorites list, despite this fact. Even if not all of the information and history is correct, I always felt like I learned so much from this book and it hit me in the imagination like very few others. Hoping I can read it again soon!

I checked out this audiobook because I knew it was a bestseller a few decades ago, and I figured that since it was a bestseller, it must be good. Oh, how wrong we can be at times.

I hate to slam books because I know authors put a lot of work into them, but I have to do it this time. This book was bad for so many reasons. First, there was a lot of repetition and needless detail. A couple hundred pages could have been cut from the manuscript without changing the story at all. How many times did we need to hear why Broud hated Ayla? Or that people feared Creb? And for people who didn’t speak with their mouths, the author certainly gave us a lot of redundant chitchat.

If these had been the books only sins, I could have forgiven them. But here’s the thing, the author created this horrible, abusive, downright evil society and then wanted us to like and care about the characters.
Here’s the life of the clan in a nutshell: They horribly abuse women. Women have no rights, can only speak to a man if he allows it, can be beaten or killed for any small offence, (Such as not getting pregnant, making a man lose face, disobeying a man, being insolent to a man, resisting rape, or not killing her baby when the leader tells her to.)

Clan life also includes cannibalism (but they do it with the utmost reverence—the author tells us), abortion, infanticide, rape, incest, dancing that verges on erotic (the author tells us twice in case we forgot it the first time) and drug use. A woman is required to have sex with any man who wants it, and free love is practiced. They view sex as a natural practice, the author told us more than once, and no one in the clan thought anything of children having sex. Hello--creepy.
Ayla is an outsider, whose parents were killed in an earthquake. The clan found her when she was five and near death. Iza, the medicine woman takes her in and makes Ayla her daughter.

So the story is about Ayla learning clan ways and getting beaten regularly (and at one point nearly to death) by Broud, the clan chief’s son.

I kept reading/listening because I figured the story was going to be about Ayla escaping from the clan and their abusive ways. I thought she would go find her only people.

In Ayla’s tenth year, Broud rapes Ayla brutally and every day. Her clan mother and father know this—everyone knows it because it happens out in public. And no one does anything to help her. They don’t think it’s wrong—because women have no rights.

Okay, at that point in the book, nothing could redeem these people, and I only kept listening because I was hoping that a comet would strike them all, wipe them out, and Ayla would get to move on. But nom it just kept getting worse. She gets pregnant, has a baby that looks like her (not of the clan) and so she runs away so she won’t have to kill it.

At last, I thought, Ayla has seen this society as evil and will escape from them. No again. She goes back, repentant and ready to die for her disobedience.

Really? Come on.

And the author keeps putting us in the mind of the Ayla’s mother and father and the clan leader—telling us that they’re really good people.
No, no they aren’t. They’re horrible. It made me cringe that Ayla felt so bad about doing things that disappointed them. Like, Oh, I was so wrong to disappoint you with some minor offense, and now you feel badly about having to curse me.

I don’t think you can always draw conclusions about an author from their books, but this one made me wonder if the author suffered an abusive background and was trying to work out—and justify—the abuse. I’ve heard more than one victim defending their abusers. They have a hard time understanding that their abusers are bad people and they themselves shouldn’t have to live with the abuse.

Luckily the audiobook was easy to skip through, so I didn’t have to listen through every minute of the book to find out what happened. I wanted to know if Ayla ever came t her senses and got away from these people.

Spoiler Alert: Broud becomes chief, takes her child away from her and demotes her father. When she complains/begs him not to do this he has the clan magician put a death curse on her.

I should take a moment to explain the death curse. Even though the clan has been around for 100,000 years, they aren’t all that bright. For example, they have never figured out that sex causes babies or that a baby inherits characteristics from his mother and father. You would have thought someone during all of those centuries would have noticed this basic part of life, but apparently not.

They do, however, think that if the magician curses you, you are instantly dead. The person they still see standing in front of them is an evil spirit who is there only to lure them into the spirit world. They won’t talk to, acknowledge, or touch the evil spirit.

So in the last scene when Ayla is cursed, she knows she has to go find somewhere else to live. At this point, I would have been happy had she taken out her sling and used it on Broud. That would have been a satisfying ending. After all, she’s good with the sling and she’s already dead, so what can the clan do to her? They think she’s a spirit so they’re afraid to touch her. Perfect revenge.

In fact, she should have killed Broud, and then taken her baby before leaving.

The author, unfortunately, overlooked this overdue but nonetheless satisfying ending in favor of more victimhood. Ayla challenges Broud to hit her. (That will make up for, um, nothing.) She tells him he can take everything away from her including her baby, but he can’t make her die.

Well, I guess that showed him. He totally got his comeuppance. The End.
I really have no idea why this book was so popular.

I loved this book when I was a teen. Indirectly, it lead to my pursuit of a BA in Anthropology. Perhaps it is that Anthropology degree that has rendered the book unreadable for me 25 years later.

Note, March 25, 2014: I edited this review slightly just now, to delete one accidental dittography. Hmmm, I thought I'd proofread this.... :-)

Auel's Earth's Children series (this opening volume was followed by, so far, four sequels) garners mixed --and mostly negative-- reviews here on Goodreads. Though none of them have reviewed it, a dozen of my Goodreads friends have given it ratings, ranging from one star to five. Obviously, my own reaction falls at the favorable end of the spectrum.

Ayla, of course, is a Cro-Magnon (i.e., an anatomically modern human; you and I are "Cro-Magnons" too, in that anthropological sense) orphaned by a natural disaster and raised by a clan of Neanderthals. For a writer of historical fiction, a prehistoric setting poses a challenge; technically, the genre embraces any fiction set in the past, but its authors usually depend heavily on written records for events and background material, and for the Ice Age, no such records exist. To her credit, Auel was the first writer in the genre to attempt it on a large scale (though Jack London and William Golding each wrote single novels set in prehistory), and to popularize it sufficiently to create a market niche and a subgenre tradition that other writers have begun to develop. In place of written records, she immersed herself in the exhaustive study of every known aspect of the physical evidence from the period, and all of the various scholarly interpretations of it. Her reconstruction of both Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal natural history, society and culture is of course speculative; but it is based meticulously on this research. Even the more controversial features of her Neanderthals --their "Memories," a genetically-transmitted racial memory of past experiences, and their difficulty with verbal speech (and consequent preference for sign language)-- have grounds in known Neanderthal physiology, such as their hyper-developed back brains, which control memory. (Although Auel is an evolutionist, she recognizes Neanderthals as "a branch of humanity" and depicts them as fully human, not as the "ape-men" who figure in London's Before Adam or Conan Doyle's The Lost World --a point in her favor.)

A weakness of Auel's writing is the converse of her strong research: she has a tendency to want to divulge every iota of erudition she has on the Ice Age world, and doesn't always seamlessly integrate it into the narrative. She also has a penchant for explicitly detailed sex, which in my estimation is not a plus. Here, however, neither of these flaws are as marked as they are in the later books (the latter because the plot here affords little occasion for it --Ayla doesn't yet have a love interest, though that gets remedied later on. :-)) IMO, her strong points outweigh these. First and foremost, she has a capacity to create fully alive, three-dimensional characters whom the reader can relate to (positively or negatively) just like real people --Iza, Creb, Brun, Broud, even several of the minor characters; and above all Ayla herself, as we watch her grow from a scared, traumatized child into a strong, highly competent and intelligent woman. Indeed, she's much too strong, competent and intelligent for some of the Clan to accept in a woman (and judging from critical and reader reactions, some moderns aren't very cool with it either! :-))

That brings up another strong point of the book --Auel's intelligent engaging of serious issues that are still relevant to our lives today. Gender roles are the most obvious; against the backdrop of the male- dominated Clan, Ayla makes a lived-out case for a genuine feminism (of the equalitarian rather than male-bashing sort) that argues for social roles based on demonstrated ability and interests, not gender. But the book also addresses issues of interracial and cross-cultural relations, and the conflict between inflexible tradition and cultural inertia, represented by the change-resistant Clan ("It's never been done before!" is leader Brun's characteristic refrain, which became a byword in our household :-)), vs. needed adaptation to changing conditions. Also, Ayla's fight to save the life of her infant son (conceived in a rape) provides a powerful pro-life message --though that may well have been unintended on Auel's part. (But as D. H. Lawrence said, "Trust the tale and not the teller." :-))

All in all, I consider this one of the better contemporary American novels in any genre, and regard Ayla as one of the greatest fictional characters --and best female role models-- in modern literature. (The series was one that I read out loud to my wife; it also became one of her all-time favorites, and she re-reads it periodically on her own!)

This was a very interesting novel. This is set during the late Pleistocene epoch and geographically seems to be set in the crimean peninsula, and speculates on Neanderthal culture and their interactions with Early Modern Humans.

The plot is quite simple, Ayla is an orphaned 5 year old Cro-Magnon girl who gets adopted by a Neanderthal clan, clan of the cave bear. The rest of the story follows her life in the clan, and her struggle to fit in.

We know very little about Neanderthals and their lives, but a lot of evidence is being unearthed lately which point towards a sophisticated culture for the Neanderthals. They used tools, personal ornaments and had burial customs. They presence of red ochre in their graves points towards the notion that they must have had some kind of spirituality. It is clear that the author did a lot of research and she managed to construct a very interesting culture for the Neanderthals. She gives them a genetic memory and a very interesting religion. Ayla is a wonderful character, and the hierarchical clan structure with women playing a secondary role gives her a lot of depth.

The biggest problem with the novel is the author's tendency to slip into long-winded descriptions that are totally incongruent with the narrative.