This book and the series that follows is endearing, troublesome, and whole-heartedly compassionate. This is the book my grandmother read to me as a little girl during the middle of a tornado, while we waited out the storm by candlelight. This is the book that started me reading... really reading.
I learned that I can love my quiet time, and apparently I love stories on the ancient human race... our beginnings. The ways of survival, ways of development, natural medicine, culture and anthropology. The flavor of this book is 'tribal', but the sentiment and the moral is, "the totem that chooses you can present many hardships and challenges, but the gifts are worth it."

What a great re-read. I definitely got A WHOLE LOT more out of this than I did when I was about 9 years old. I will be keeping my rating at a high 4!

The amount of research it must have taken to complete this book is impressive. Although at times long-winded, Auel's descriptions of the prehistoric setting really transports the reader right back into that time period. And what we don't know from history, she manages to expertly fill in the gaps with her imagination, creating a fascinating mythology and believable cast of characters.

The main character, Ayla, is incredibly resilient and interesting to follow. I cared deeply about what happened to her and was constantly enthralled to learn what her future would hold. I look forward to continuing on with the series and finally finishing what I started almost 20 years ago.

Girl power in the age of Neanderthals
I had not expected it at all, but I enjoyed reading this, because as a story this is quite strong. Auel has made a tremendous creative effort to reconstruct the Neanderthals' world, based on what was known at the time of publication in 1980, and she has woven an original and dramatic storyline around it, including many own interpretations anf fantasy elements, of course. With main character Ayla, the Sapiens girl who was found by the Neanderthal tribe and grows up with them, she actually puts a clear feminist accent. This is also manifestly a political novel, in which the thoughtful tribal leader Brun is contrasted with the rash incoming leader Broud.

Especially the psychological side of the novel is extraordinarily strong. This is evident in the passages in which the characters muse about their own feelings and those of others in the clan, about how they best handle certain situations and how they can or cannot reconcile long and short term. There is clearly also a teacher in Auel, because she gives a lot of attention to explaining special features of clan life, such as the magical ceremonies, the techniques for hunting or using medicinal plants. But sometimes she exaggerates, which slows down the story. From a historical and scientifical point of view, her book doesn’t hold on: her Neanderthal world contains too much fantasy-elements. But her basic intuition, namely that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens have interbred in the meanwhile has been confirmed by paleo-genetic research. More on these historical aspects in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show....