Rating: 
Summary: Just bad..
Review: What we have here is modem day men who are compassionate and understanding of women's thoughts, feelings and pleasures.. add in some 1950's soap or toothbrush commercial type conversation and finally set it in a caveman period. We have obviously gone backwards since in this book, all men think about is ensuring that their women feel pleasure. The pain and guilt that men feel if they do not bring her to orgasm is too much to bear and I am surprised they do not go running and screaming into the night to immediately committee suicide when they fail. Seriously, every woman in this series experiences intense orgasms, every time.
Examples of breath taking writing :
"Do you also have a ceremony initiation into womanhood with understanding and gentleness. First rights? Yes, of course. How could anyone not care about how a young woman is opened the first time."
&
"This time he hesitated, he had also felt a terrible guilt afterwards for using the deeply secrete ceremony to satisfy his own needs for the deeper feelings it invokes."
The repetitiveness of stuff in previous chapters or books is extremely annoying. Hearing people discuss new techniques and discoveries every paragraph would have put us at a rate to invent the airplane by 2000BC instead of 1904AD .. I really find it difficult to say anything good about Jean Auel's books since the excellent `Clan of the Cave Bear'. Had she taken the story in this book and condensed it into 300 pages, it might have been half decent.
Rating: 
Summary: Still compelling, but weaker than its predecessors....
Review: The author does a wonderful job of portraying the complexity of human relationships, but the story is beginning to seem a little too unbelievable. It's very well written, and still enormously entertaining, but Auel's talent seems to have waned slightly in the telling of this portion of the epic tale.
Rating: 
Summary: This is a yawner
Review: This whole book seems like filler that Jean M. Auel inflicted on us just because she decided this series should have six books in it before she started the series. The main plot line isn't that great; Ayla is torn between sex partners. Oh wow! The book is over flowing with boring sex scenes -- if I wanted this much sex in a book, I think I know where to look for something like that, but it wouldn't ever be anything by Jean M. Auel.
Rating:
Summary: series progressively getting worse
Review: I read the Clan of the Cave Bear for a project in school and thoroughly enjoyed the entire book. I decided that I would read the entire series. The Valley of Horses was a good book but the chapters I enjoyed dealt mainly with Jondalar and his brother Thonolan, not Ayla. I pushed on to The Mammoth Hunters and decided to stop reading the series here. This book basically bored me to death. As in the other mostly negative reviews I have the same beefs: too much sex, Ayla can do no wrong, and things are repeated far too often. Props go out to anyone who finishes this series.
Rating:
Summary: The worst of the series
Review: Some thoughts. It's repetitive. In the first two books, we learn a lot. In this one, the third in the series, Auel feels like she needs to teach us everything all over again. While this may be helpful to someone who may not have read one of the other books the fact that she makes these references several times in each books is just annoying. There's too much sex. Honestly. There's only so much a person can handle when forced to read about "her petal-like folks" and his "throbbing manhood". Granted, some of it was for a reason, such as the beginnings of Ayla's "relationship" with Ranec, but much of it is repetative as Auel's constant references to wolverine fur, the knots in Ayla's herb pouches, and Ayla's menstral cycle. It's boring. When I get it in my head that I want to read through the series, I will either skip this book entirely, or skip about 400 pages in the middle. The Ayla-Jondalar-Ranec love-triangle in the middle of the story serves no purpose in the plotline. Much of the relationship is based on sex, which just ties into my previous point.
Rating: 
Summary: Last of the series worth reading
Review: First I want to say that again her research once again blew my mind. The details were amazing. The story just keeps unfolding and I find myself unable to put it down. This book was everything I was expecting and more. I never thought that Ayla would be tempted to stray. The emotions in this book was equally intriguing as the last. In this book, since they were not the only two for miles away you could see how the different upbringing had effected eachother. I kept wanting to jump inside and just tell them both of what fools they were and if they would just open their eyes they would see that they do love eachother. But of course the suspense just made the book even better. I thought it was quite interesting how she used the cultural differences to make an impressive story. Once again, I was amazed.
| 
