**My #7 Favorite Read of 2013**

A Unique and Entrancing 5 Stars

When rating a book, I compare it to others in the same genre. For historical fiction, 5 stars are rare. But "The Clan of the Cave Bear" has no equals. It explores a time I've never read about. As historical fiction, it meets all my requirements. There's a sense of realism, like the author really researched the period. The characters fit the time, and the author makes history come alive.

As for historical accuracy, it's probably more fiction than history. The setting is prehistoric times, and what we know is just guesswork. But Jean Auel clearly did her research and gives an interesting look at prehistoric life.

**Plot summary**

After an earthquake kills Ayla's family, she's adopted by a Neanderthal clan. Ayla is different from her new family. She's tall, blond, inquisitive, and logical, while they're short, squat, survival-oriented, and have instinctual ways. She struggles to be accepted, but her creative mind helps her integrate.

**The Good**

The book has minimal dialogue, with the clan using hand signals. It feels natural and comfortable. The story also integrates theories of early man well. The idea of shared and instinctual memory gives the Neanderthals a human and animalistic feel.

**The Bad**

I have very little negative to say. Sometimes the conversation felt too modern, but considering the author was expressing non-verbal communication, I can't fault her. Overall, any issues I had were petty and not worth mentioning.

**Content Advisories**

It's hard to find info on a book's sex/violence/language content. I try to give you the details so you can make an informed decision. Disclaimer: I don't count the occurrences of adult language.

Scale 1 - Lowest 5 - Highest

**Sex** - 2.5
There's discussion of sexual intercourse. The family lived in caves without privacy, so sex was open. There's also a chapter about rapes, but the descriptions aren't graphic.

**Language** - 1
There's no use of adult language.

**Violence** - 3
There's violence, including physical assaults on women. There's one serious assault and several punches. There's also some gore in hunting scenes and an instance of cannibalism.

It took me a whopping TWO months to read this book. TWO WHOLE MONTHS, and yet I'm still in a state of utter confusion about how I truly feel.

On one hand, the premise and its execution are truly awe-inspiring. I have to give credit to Jean Auel for her extensive research during a time (pre-internet) when so little was known about the Pre-historic era. Her attention to detail and the vivid world she creates are quite remarkable.

BUT. There's a huge BUT. The misogynistic culture depicted in the clan makes it extremely difficult for me to read. I'm not certain if it was known during the time Auel was researching the Earth's Children series, but the societies of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were actually egalitarian. I've read my fair share of misogynistic literature, but TCoftCB is an entirely different beast to handle.

Then there's the issue with Ayla, who seems to be the grandmother of every Mary Sue in literature. She's blonde, tall, and slim (yet she thinks she's ugly), can hunt (even though women aren't allowed to hunt because they're considered inferior), has the strongest totem (except for Broud's), is an amazing medicine woman, and everyone loves her (except Broud, the prehistoric ratbastard). She can do everything! WOW!!! I don't know if Auel intended it, but TCotCB has subtle racist undertones that really prevent me from fully enjoying the book. (Not to mention the rape and regular beatings - this book is like a white supremacist's wet dream.)

Overall, my feelings about this book are a complex mix of admiration and disappointment.

**"The Incredible World of Jean M. Auel's Novels"**

¡Sencillamente impresionante! I first came across this book through my friend Juan Fernando Salazar, who asked me a few Christmases ago to help him obtain printed copies of the complete saga. The reason was that he wanted to prepare a surprise gift for his wife, my friend Angela Rendón, who turned out to be a fanatic of Jean M. Auel's books.

My initial impression of the saga was that it was juvenile literature. However, Angela was an adult. Why did she like them so much? The multiple editions that have been published and continue to be published since the first book appeared in the early 1980s always have the appearance of adventure books with colorful covers and figures that make them attractive to the eye. In short, books that are mostly consumed by young people.

But like all first impressions, this one was also loaded with unconscious biases. Juvenile literature can be as or more sophisticated than the rest of literature, so it's not the case to make a distinction or think that because a book has a colorful cover, it's aimed at a non-adult audience. In fact, in the particular case of "The Clan of the Cave Bear," which I now clearly don't consider a juvenile literature book, I truly hope that if it has been read by many young people in these 40 years, it has fulfilled its mission of captivating a large number of readers with this amazing work and the incredible amount of good science it contains.

Despite my misleading impressions and being touched by the curiosity that a friend like Angela, who is also a recognized scientist, was a fanatic of Auel's work, I was encouraged to get my own copy, at least of the first book, and see where the saga went. The theme, to begin with, couldn't have been better for me: a fiction about the life of humans in prehistoric times. I have always been powerfully attracted to the history of our species and, in general, of all the species of humans that lived in what we know as the Paleolithic period.

Well, that was until I read "The Clan of the Cave Bear." I didn't really expect to find an author with the knowledge, human and scientific intuition, creativity, and in short, the genius of Jean Auel. Auel, instead of restricting herself to narrating the life of a group of humans during one of the past glacial periods, puts on a "hair shirt" and decides to tell the story of the encounter between two human species: Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis.

Simply brilliant! It's a well-known fact today, thanks to advances in paleoanthropology and especially in molecular biology, that the two most recent species of the Homo genus - or humans in short - coexisted in regions of Europe during the last two or three glacial periods. In the process, they suffered what is known in biology as hybridization or, in plain words, they had sex and left descendants. As a result of this hybridization, some genes that we know were exclusive to our Neanderthal brothers remained in the genome of Sapiens and are there, apparently, producing a genetic memory of a past with a more diverse humanity.

What we don't know exactly, and what the DNA molecules and many archaeological remains can't tell us, is what the conditions were in which that hybridization occurred, that is, under what circumstances males and females of both species met, overcame their physical - not to mention genetic - differences, their cultural and linguistic differences, and were finally able to reproduce. This is precisely the theme of the first book of this incredible saga. Isn't it brilliant?

One might think, however, that it's easy to imagine some of those encounters. Perhaps the physical and cultural differences weren't so great and interspecific love wasn't so rare in the Paleolithic. Or perhaps, and more disturbingly, the hybridizations occurred through rapes and never in peaceful encounters, as we know has happened between modern primate species. But no. In reality, the task of imagining this cross between species is particularly difficult, and that's where Auel's genius left me in awe.

To begin with, the author had to solve the problem of communication between two types of human minds, one possibly similar to ours (the mind of Paleolithic Sapiens) and a completely extinct mind. The most serious problem is that what was going on in the minds of the Neanderthals, whose brain structure we almost completely ignore, can only be deduced from some remains found, for example, artistic objects, burials, among others. These remains give us some clues about their culture and show us that it was more sophisticated than one might initially think. But nothing more. What you can say from there about what was going through the minds of the Neanderthals depends on literary imagination.

On the other hand, there is the mind of Paleolithic Sapiens, or "the others" as the Neanderthals in Auel's saga call them. Although it may seem easy to imagine what a human thought 50,000 years ago, the truth is that it's also difficult. If it's easy for us to imagine what people from distant but contemporary cultures think, just imagine the leap we have to make to put ourselves in the shoes of a Paleolithic Sapiens woman.

To achieve this, Auel accomplishes the feat of inventing not only a Neanderthal language - or one of many that surely existed among them - but also creating almost from scratch - although in the image of Sapiens cultures - a culture, a religion, a way of seeing the human world, but Neanderthal. Through hundreds of pages, Auel transports you to the minds of these humans, introduces you to the unfortunately now extinct cultures. In the process, you are forced to do an exercise of otherness that you can hardly do, even with almost any other literary work, in the vast majority of which only Sapiens are the protagonists.

The work abounds in overwhelmingly detailed descriptions of the places of an unknown world, the Earth of a glacial era, of extinct animals, including their physical characteristics and particular behaviors, and the most incredible thing, an enormous diversity of plants, especially plants with medicinal applications. I'm completely sure that Jean Auel is an expert in the subject. And I can't imagine a writer who is a botany enthusiast and has an encyclopedia capable of producing the incredibly detailed descriptions of the plants and their effects that there are in this novel.

Each thing surprised me more than the previous one. I must confess that this level of detail can detract from the attractiveness of the novel in some parts. In fact, it can even be the cause of some people abandoning it without finishing it. I wouldn't blame them. Many times I felt transported to the interminable - and possibly unbearable - chapters of the great novel "Moby Dick" in which Melville, apparently without good reasons, dedicates himself to making a small treatise on ballenology (sic.). Now that I say it, "The Clan of the Cave Bear" could be called the Moby Dick of paleoanthropology.

We therefore have before us not only a beautiful novel inspired by the encounter between past humans but also a work of paleontological and biological dissemination written in literary code and that, I believe, has no equal in literature. A true journey to the otherness of the people who inhabited the Earth long before Sapiens won the battle for survival on a changing planet. Naturally, I got hooked on the saga. Here I will continue reporting my progress with the other books. I have already started with "The Valley of Horses."

Sometimes I truly desired to hurl this book out of the window. Or perhaps at someone. It's a rather hefty little paperback, and my copy is so old that the pages no longer lie neatly beside each other on the spine, making it seem even larger than it actually is. I have no doubt that if it were to strike someone on the head, it could seriously irritate that person and might even cause a headache. That's often the feeling I had while reading The Clan of the Cave Bear. But I wouldn't turn this book into a projectile out of mere spite or a desire to cause headaches. No, the temptation was simply an urge to get the book as far away from me as quickly as possible.

I apologize for the somewhat lengthy and uncharacteristic paragraph of plot summary that follows. I promise it has a point.

In a world of long, harsh winters and short summers, the Clan of the Cave Bear is a humanoid civilization that worships Ursus for bringing them culture and traditions. There are many clans within the Clan, each living in their own caves, having their own leaders, medicine women, and mog-urs (shamans). One such clan, led by the fair-minded Brun, is searching for a new cave after theirs was destroyed in an earthquake. They stumble across an injured five-year-old child - but she is not Clan. She is a member of the Others, a strange species that looks humanoid but is not Clan. Brun reluctantly allows his medicine woman to care for the child, whose name is Ayla. For the most part, this brings his clan great luck, but Ayla has a lot of trouble fitting in. She fails to conform to the Clan standards for women, preferring instead to hunt and assert herself in ways permitted only to men. And she earns the ire of the future leader of the clan, the impetuous Broud. Through the eyes of Ayla and members of Brun's clan, Jean Auel tells a story about family, acceptance, loyalty, honour, tradition, and yes, race.

There is just one problem.

This book is actually set 30,000 years ago in prehistoric Europe. The Clan are the Neanderthals, while the Others are Cro-Magnons, anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens. While this might not sound problematic - and I admit that I'm probably weird seeing it as a problem - it is the one element of this book that I cannot overlook.

I know this book is insanely popular (especially given its subject matter). I might even have read it at some point in the distant past (14? 16? I don't recall). To be honest, I probably wouldn't have ever picked up this book again were it not for the fact that I inherited it from a friend who moved away. I like historical fiction, but prehistorical fiction is another matter.

Historical fiction is based, in addition to archaeological evidence, on primary source material like written records, artwork, and if it's more recent, photography and audio or video recordings. The farther back in time one goes, the sparser the record and the more difficult it is to portray a society "realistically". Often this isn't a problem; it's fiction, after all, and we expect some licence.

Prehistory is different. By definition, there are not written records; there are precious few remnants of artwork, and much to our chagrin, the Neanderthals recorded everything on Betamax or, much later, in whatever format the Zune uses. (And who has one of those these days?) So their voices are probably lost to us forever. We can speculate, but it is very difficult to determine what Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon culture was like from the archaeological record. This gives archaeologists and anthropologists plenty to do when they are not actually in the fields, digging up our ancestors. It lets them form (perhaps untestable) hypotheses about homonin societies based on what evidence we do have. That's really cool, and I love reading non-fiction books about such theories. The dearth of solid information, however, makes the job of a writer of prehistorical fiction that much more difficult. I'm not going to rule out all prehistorical fiction from this one experience, but Auel has not convinced me that The Clan of the Cave Bear is a shining example of the genre.

Where do I even begin?

In a story that challenges biology, geology, common sense, and all beliefs, Jean M. Auel presents us with a particularly disturbing self-insert in the form of Ayla. Ayla is a Cro-Magnon girl who is raised by a tribe of dull Neanderthals.

Not only is Ayla strong, beautiful (despite considering herself ugly and believing no one could ever love her), and talented, but she is also a virtual genius. Throughout the series, she invents or discovers an astonishing array of things.

She creates the spear thrower, masters basket-weaving, develops superior weapon-making techniques, discovers the sewing needle, surgical stitching, horseback riding, the bra, domesticates animals, invents the travois, figures out how to use flint and pyrite to start a fire, understands the concept of biological reproduction when pregnancy is thought to be magic, and even discovers contraception. Given a few more books, she might even split the atom.

She also has an amazing memory, knows everything there is to know about medicinal herbs, learns an entire language in a single dream, and may be psychic.

But if you like this, you'll love the second book, where she finds her True Love in Jondalar, a sexy and angst-ridden character. His large penis has always been too intimidating for his sexual partners until Ayla comes along, and then the series devolves into bad caveman porn. I assume they continue to travel the land, astonishing everyone they meet (because anyone who doesn't adore Ayla at first sight is clearly a Bad Person).

Ayla may just be one of the most annoying literary characters ever created.

This was an extremely interesting novel.

It is set during the late Pleistocene epoch and geographically appears to be located in the Crimean Peninsula. It speculates on Neanderthal culture and their interactions with Early Modern Humans.

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

We know very little about Neanderthals and their lives. However, a great deal of evidence is being unearthed lately, which indicates a sophisticated culture for the Neanderthals. They utilized tools, wore personal ornaments, and had burial customs. The presence of red ochre in their graves suggests the idea that they must have had some sort of spirituality. It is evident that the author conducted a significant amount of research and was able to construct a highly interesting culture for the Neanderthals. She赋予 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 adds a great deal of depth to her.

The largest problem with the novel is the author's propensity to lapse into long-winded descriptions that are completely inconsistent with the narrative.

At the end of reading this novel, the greatest regret was thinking that I had incredibly left it on my bookshelf for 23 years since its purchase without ever deciding to read it! However, the awareness of having the next volume makes me extremely happy because it allows me to immediately continue reading this wonderful saga. In fact, this first novel of the series, set approximately 30,000 years ago, towards the end of the last ice age, literally hooked me to its pages, allowing me to learn, albeit in a fictional form, how a clan of humans in prehistory was organized and how their daily life unfolded over the seasons, and to get to know the many aspects that regulated the life of our ancestors in the absence of modern technology. But also the plot of the novel has proven to be winning thanks to the skill of the writer who was able to tell, in the microcosm of a small community, the concatenation of positive and negative emotions of individuals and of the whole enclave, especially thanks to the very original idea of inserting a disruptive character, the very young Ayla, into the apparently "tranquil" context of the clan regulated by rigid laws handed down orally. And it will be Ayla with her "novelty", with her open and future-oriented mental structure, to upset the clan and try to improve it. The plot never shows any concessions despite the booklet approaching 500 pages, and it flows very pleasantly for a smooth reading. It is impossible not to give the maximum number of stars!

This novel truly offers a captivating journey into the distant past, painting a vivid picture of a bygone era. The detailed descriptions of the prehistoric environment, the social dynamics within the clan, and the struggles and growth of the characters make it a truly engaging read.

I am now eagerly looking forward to delving into the next volume to see how Ayla's story continues to unfold and how she impacts the clan and its future.

Ms Auel, I have several things to discuss with you. I must admit, I'm rather angry as I keep reading your books for some strange reason, and it makes me cringe and pull my hair out in despair. You had a great story idea - a Cro-Magnon orphan girl found and raised by Neanderthals. I didn't even mind that she turned out to be the smartest, most beautiful, and most ingenious little thing, and that the villain was almost grotesque and cartoonish in his evil deeds. I knew no real harm would come to Ayla, she would survive it all and maybe even invent an iPhone. It was all okay, it was comfort reading after all. But it was the writing that gave me many problems.

First of all, the point of view. The use of modern medical terms like 'hypothermia' and 'diuretic' in a story set in 35000 BC was quite jarring. I wanted to experience the story through the eyes of prehistoric people, not be bombarded with a running commentary that sounded like a BBC documentary. This forced me to view the story from a modern, dispassionate perspective, which led me to conclude that half of it was unbelievable nonsense.

The narrative also jumped the shark when it implied that Neanderthal women were afraid of learning new things because of hereditary memory and its impact on childbirth. And don't get me started on the reasons for Broud's hatred of Ayla - because of her forward-thinking frontal lobes? It was all just too much.

Secondly, the repetitions were driving me crazy. I understand that we don't have the memory of Neanderthals, but I'm pretty sure the average human doesn't need to have the same information repeated every five pages. This book could have easily been 150 pages shorter without losing anything.

Another issue was the way Auel showed and then told. She seemed to assume that we, the readers, were completely dumb and wouldn't understand the implications of the dialogue. For example, when Brun praised Zoug's skill with the sling, the last sentence explaining why he did so was completely unnecessary.

And then there was all the other random nonsense. Ayla was supposed to be a genius who could invent anything and understand calculus, but she had never seen anyone gesticulate? It just didn't make sense.

On top of all this, the descriptions were boring and felt like enumerations. Even the Neanderthal Olympic Games were dull. And to top it off, there were no sexy scenes in this volume!

I'm almost ashamed to admit that I also read book two, and it wasn't until around page 30 of book three that I managed to break free and decide I couldn't take it anymore. It was like crack, ruining my life.

I hope you take these criticisms to heart and consider improving your writing in future works.

She was one of the Others, a distinct and unique breed. Younger and more vibrant, she was not shackled by the archaic and inflexible traditions that held sway over the minds of the older generation, which seemed to be dominated almost entirely by memories. Her brain charted different courses, and her full, high forehead, housing the forward-thinking frontal lobes, bestowed upon her an understanding from a perspective that was altogether different. She had the ability to embrace the new, shape it according to her will, and forge it into ideas that the Clan could never have dreamed of. In the natural order of things, her kind was fated to replace the ancient and dying race.

This book has resided on my TBR list for countless years, and I am truly overjoyed that I finally managed to get around to reading it. I thoroughly relished delving deeper into this era, which dates back somewhere between 28,000 to 25,000 years before the present. I believe the author did an outstanding job of presenting their daily lives to us. I was particularly impressed by all the information regarding herbs and how Iza, the medicine woman, utilized them. When historical fiction ventures this far back in time, I am aware that a significant amount of fiction and fantasy must be involved. However, according to most sources, the author's work is remarkably accurate and authentic, especially when it comes to anthropology. It has been discovered that Neanderthals had a hyoid bone and may have been capable of using vocal language, contrary to what is portrayed in the series. I never realized that the Cro-Magnons and the Neanderthals coexisted at a certain point in time, and I found this aspect of the story to be extremely fascinating. I wholeheartedly recommend this book to all enthusiasts of historical fantasy.

The Story: Bid farewell to the modern world and journey back to Ice Age Europe. Traverse the life of Ayla, a Cro-Magnon child who loses her parents in an earthquake and is adopted by a tribe of Neanderthals, known as the Clan. Witness how the Clan's initial wary suspicion gradually evolves into acceptance of this girl, who is so different from them, under the guidance of its medicine woman Iza and its wise holy man Creb.

After 20 years, I am reading this book once more, yet with distinct eyes.

I still hold a liking for the story, but I have discovered that it can be rather violent at certain moments.

Nonetheless, it remains a truly great read.

The experience has made me eager to pick up and reread the other books as well.

It's fascinating how our perspectives can change over time.

What once seemed entirely engaging might now have aspects that give us pause.

But despite this, the overall charm and value of the book still shine through.

I look forward to delving into the other books and seeing how they might have evolved in my perception.

Perhaps I will unearth new details and interpretations that I missed before.

This journey of rereading is like rediscovering an old friend, with both familiarity and newfound insights.

It's an exciting adventure that I can't wait to embark on.

A quick note - I term this as a "historical fiction" as it is set in Prehistoric Europe during the Ice Age. The Pleistocene Epoch endured from 35,000 - 25,000 BCE, with a period of interstadial, a warming phase during which the events of the book occur. Thus, a significant portion of the story is supported by extensive research.

So, why this note? I wish to issue a cautionary note regarding her description of "shared memory" (which is still poorly understood outside certain animals) and her referring to it as "telepathy". I comprehend the logic she is following, but in my humble opinion, she ventures perilously close to fantasy. However, disregarding that small detail, the remainder of the story is quite plausible, and the herbs/foods/utensils are highly accurate for the time.

The Clan of the Cave Bear are Neanderthals. As they are migrating in search of a new cave, they encounter a little girl named Ayla. Ayla is one of the Others (Cro-Magnon). The rest of the story details how Ayla integrates into the Clan. Through the characters, Jean Auel skillfully transports the reader into the practices and daily life of this Clan. Their foods, rituals, and traditions are all presented here and plausibly explained. I was truly impressed by the author's in-depth research on many of the aspects she mentions - from medicinal herbs to foodstuffs and the creation and use of utensils.

The story is also engaging and exciting. Ayla's attempts to integrate into the Clan serve to highlight the differences between the two types of humans. One can read between the lines and observe the inevitable end of the Clan in terms of biological advancement throughout the story, as they seem incapable of truly adapting to radically new environments. Nevertheless, these are not mere savages banging on rocks. There is drama, politics, honor, and spiritual rituals, all of which are well-explained throughout the narrative. If you are interested in what life was like during this era, then Ayla's adventures with the Clan will serve as your gateway into this world.

Well-written, easy to read, and doing an excellent job of explaining daily life without being overly didactic - this was a really enjoyable read. I look forward to locating the rest of this series and completing it. I would highly recommend this to any enthusiast of historical fiction set in Prehistoric times.

[Ayla] was a woman, and she had more courage than you...more determination, more self-control.

Ayla was just a five-year-old child when an earthquake forced her to flee her destroyed home and her dead parents. Iza, the medicine woman of the Clan of the Cave Bear, happened upon her and took her under her wing. However, Broud, the proud son of the clan leader, Brun, immediately disliked the young non-Clan girl. Ayla grew up among the clan and struggled to find her place.

I've heard a great deal about this series of books, especially with the most recent (and apparently last of the series??) release of The Land of Painted Caves. While I had read that that book wasn't so great, I did read reviews that praised the first few books. So I went out and got my hands on an audiobook of the first in the Earth's Children series.

First off, I have to give credit to Auel for all the research and time she dedicated to this novel. This woman didn't simply say, "I'm going to write a pre-historic novel" and then just toss in some almost modern humans in a backdrop world. This book transports you back before cars and computers, before women's rights and civil rights, into a fantasy realm of what the world might have been like before the modern age. It was vivid and meticulously detailed. I adored how the Others could speak but the Clan could not; how the Clan could access memories but were poor at new innovations while the opposite was true of the Others. A lesser author, as I mentioned, would have seen the work required and given up; Auel persevered and produced an excellent novel.

Besides the vivid setting, the characters were detailed and complex. My favorites were Iza and Creb, but I also liked Ayla herself, Brun, and Ooba (sp?). I loved how Iza embraced Ayla and was thoughtful enough to pass along the medicine woman trade, trying to think of Ayla's future. Iza was a warm, loving, kind-hearted, strong woman. Creb was amazing. I thought he was sweet and kind, a good father-figure for Ayla, and I loved the comparisons between him and Ayla and between him and Ayla's son, Dirk. Ayla was a great character; she grows so much throughout the book. She tries to find her place in the clan; she is constantly testing the boundaries, but not because she is always defiant. Ayla is just not Clan; she is of the Others, and that heritage shows through. I liked the differences that she emphasized between Clan and Others: speech, crying, differences in body shape (I really liked how the Clan had a different perception of beauty). There were a few times when she (or her son) got perilously close to that Mary Sue line--the number of times she breaks rules and manages to avoid being killed is quite astonishing. However, I think Ayla did have enough flaws, and was legitimately punished enough that I didn't focus on it too much. (I wonder, though, how far into the series her descent into Mary Sue-ism becomes complete.) Brun was a great strong leader; he listened to his people, but wasn't afraid of taking action or of meting out punishment. And Ooba became such a sweet, loving sister to Ayla. I couldn't help but think of me and my sister when I read about the two.

The story meanders along Ayla's life, her struggles to become Clan, and her tension with Broud. I loved how she learned to hunt with a sling, and I liked how she became a good medicine woman, how she would drop everything to try to save someone's life. I got to learn so much in this book, my mind was stretched to new depths--what would life be like living in a cave? What was the world like before?

If anything about the story bothered me, it would be the sudden detours into discussions about mixing medicines. As I said above, I loved the research Auel put into this book; that being said, inserting several passages solely to show what plants mixed with what roots would make a cure for this ailment got old quickly. Fortunately, there were not too many of these scenes, but there were enough to be noticeable.

Also, there is quite a bit of violence/abuse in this novel. Women are basically treated like property. Men can beat women and consider it completely justified--this happens to Ayla quite a few times in the book. Men also can force a woman to have sex whenever the urge strikes them--even if the woman is not their wife. Again, this happens to Ayla quite a bit, in a rather uncomfortable rape montage (nothing is too graphic, however). While I am sure this is more realistic than having Clan women burning their bras (or whatever they would have used for bras), it is not for everyone and was rather uncomfortable at times to listen to. Sometimes, I wanted to smack some sense into these Clan men--how dare they treat someone like that! Being female does NOT mean being stupid and being unable to think for oneself! Ultimately, I appreciated how Auel did NOT resort to writing the Clan as if they were wise, with modern sensibilities about feminism...but I still hated the abuse.

I truly cannot wait to start reading the next book. I am desperate to know what happens to Ayla...does she meet up with her people? Does she find a mate? I've read enough reviews to know some of the answers to my questions, but that doesn't make me any less eager to read for myself. I greatly enjoyed this prehistoric journey, and I definitely recommend it--with the caveat that there is some abuse/violence to be aware of.