My experience with this series can be compared to a drug addiction. I don’t like it but I need more. As a young adolescent I traversed the Jack London/Louis L'Amour historical novel landscape. One day I decided to venture into pre-historical novels when I heard about Jean M. Auel’s research for her books. She actually walked along the land, like Louis and Jack did.



I loved Clan of the Cave Bear. Great book. The Valley of the Horses wasn’t bad, except for the ending turning into a ROMANCE NOVEL!



I was hooked on the characters. Hook line and sinker! I feel like I was talked into buying a set of encyclopedias.



Mammoth Hunters & Plains of Passage, I had to read in secrecy. I was actually reading romance novels! One after the other, I couldn’t believe it. This did my egos no favors. Now a couple of the love scenes I did appreciate, but SERIOUSLY, so much? My purpose for reading the books wasn’t to get off.



After recently reading The Shelters of Stone I have come to a conclusion about Jean M. Auel’s writing: She writes every book with the assumption that the reader has not read the previous books. Thus the exhausting rehash of everything, to everybody new she meets. Did I need to know how every person of Zelandonii reacted to Wolf, to her accent, to the horses, to her magnificent beauty? Geeez.



Just because some of Jean M. Auel’s previous books were quite long, she feels she needs to churn out an equal number of pages in every book. I would not object to a 450 page, hell a 300 page book. Especially, if the alternative is filler the likes of which resembles my 12th grade (25 page minimum) term paper on censorship. Ugh.



Jean m. Auel obviously possess a vast reservoir of pre-history knowledge and doesn’t hesitate to share in an attempt to fill more pages to reach her telephone book quota. I wish the storytelling was worked on with the same fervor as the fact cramming was. However in the previous books there was always an artifact section of actually excavated tools, vessels, statuettes, etc. – which Jean M. Auel had woven into the story. I missed this in The Shelters of the Stone. I enjoyed that section in the previous books.



By the way, all the love scenes and the times we read about Ayla’s beauty have been ruined by the thought that nobody really shaved then, unless Jondalar and Ayla single-handedly thrust the Zelondonii people into the Iron Age. I’ll bet any money, Ayla and Jondalar develop the wheel in the next book.



This book could have been easily edited down to a slim 450 pages and it would have been good, but reading the 800 some page book is the literary version of hitting yourself in the forehead with a wooden plank, over and over and over again, and liking it.



Hey “An Actual Guy”, you forgot about the reunion of Ayla and Durc during a Clan summer meeting where Ayla leads a delegation of animals and Zelondonii traders in order to open communication and trading lines. But Ayla does not exist to the clan because she has a death curse – and hilarity shall ensue.