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Summary: And now for the rest of the story...
Review: After finishing "Plains of Passage" years ago, I closed the book thinking that there was so much more I wanted to know. Frankly, I had the same impression after finishing "Shelters of Stone". This is not necessarily a criticism, but a caution for those people who like everything tied up neatly at the end of a book.
It almost seems that Jean Auel may have written two books worth of material, and just broke this off at a convienent stopping point. There is still more of the story to be told, and I'm looking forward to it. The characters are still compelling and the description of prehistoric living is interesting.
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Summary: Stretched too thin
Review: I enjoyed the saga up to the Valley of the Horses, and was a little disppointed by The Plains of Passage. But this last book is nothing but a tedious account of the day-to-day life of some stone age tribe. It is slow, repetitive and boring. In fact it is about the only book I haven't finished in the last ten years.
Just a book about the properties of plants.
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Summary: Deffinately Worth Reading
Review: This book was very enjoyable. The characters continue to grow throughout the series. I would have liked more interaction between Ayla and Jondalar, perhaps I expected it after the last book where they were traveling alone much of the time. I also missed some of the interaction with the animals. I did find some stories repeditive as they were retold continually throughout the book. Maybe if I hadn't reread the whole series just before starting this book the reviewing of past stories would have been better apreciated. As for the way they introduce a character everytime they meet someone new it could get pretty old. The end of the book was the best part, I was just getting to the story I really wanted to read right before it ended. Overall I would recomend this book to anyone who has already started this series. Hopefully it will not take so many years for Jean M. Auel to get the next one published.
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Summary: Wow
Review: Wow. Shelters of Stone was the first Jean M. Auel book I read- I was in the store and saw an interesting looking book on the bestsellers rack. So I picked it up, took it home, and started reading it. It was slow at first, and I had no idea what was going on, but after a while I got the idea and started to really like it. The introductions are repetative ("Ayla, of the Clan of the Cave Bear, Friend of Jondalar, Friend of Wolf, Protected by the spirit of the Cave Lion..."), and some might say the book has too much [love scenes] in it, and I agree- there is a bit too much, it's like, once every chapter. And the detail is repetative. But those are minor flaws. After I finished Shelters of Stone, I looked to see the other books in the series, and I checked out Clan of the Cave Bear from the library. The whole series rocks. I haven't read Valley of Horses yet, the Library didn't have it, but I'm about halfway through Mammoth Hunters.
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Summary: Ayla the female Messiah 25000 years ago?
Review: I give this book a reluctant 3 stars, and only, because, it is in the line of a great series. At the risk of sounding redundant, the author repeats herself over and over again, like a doddering old senile person, who can't remember what they've told you five minutes ago. Finding myself reading about the same exact thing two pages later, and then a chapter later, and so on and so on, was very irritating. Jean please give us the credit to make the leap, when necessary, and please there is no need to pound our minds with repetitions, we get it the first or second or even third time, more is not fun. This book is a recap of the previous books, in the series, and a set up for the next one. You can totally skip this book and miss nothing. The only important things that happen in this book, are Ayla meeting Jondulars family, Jondular and Ayla getting married, having their baby, and then ending with Ayla agreeing to train to be a spiritual leader. Well, we knew those things were happening in the previous books, so what took so long to think up, nothing, new? I do think it was an ingenuous way, to recap the series, with Jondular and Ayla telling their stories, and adventures, to Jondular's family, highlighting the great art of story telling, being a way of life. But the editor should've cut this book in half, if not more. The first 500 pages of the book takes place in a time span of about one week, and is a chore to get through...it finally picks up the pace the last 300 pages. But the whole 800+ pages don't even cover a year's time. Even the few attempts at drama in this book fail to spark any excitement. I had to wonder as I was dredging through all the myriad of factual sounding detail, how much of it was really true to the time. Some of it is a bit unbelievable and the forward attitudes are a bit far fetched, for 25000 years ago. If those, long winded, sometimes tedious, details are not true, I would rather read about the subject in a history book. I choose to read historical novels to be entertained, as well as learn a few interesting facts. Please do not give me false history lessons in an novel, especially boring ones. And last, it has been my thought from the beginning of the series, that, maybe Ayla a is a sort of female Jesus, come to earth 2500 years ago, do you think? Well, I hope the next book lives up to the promise of the past books, and of good things to come, as set up in Shelters...Kathy Struewing.
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Summary: Dissapointing?...not sure
Review: When I think of what the fifth book COULD have been like, yes this book was dissapointing. I feel let down, because I thought there was a fantastical element to Ayla's Saga. Throughout the series I felt, Auel was hinting at greater things to come for our heroine. But then again, I don't think we can expect "The Clan Of The Cave Bear" in this, or in any of the other books really. I think Auel is pulled between the "scientific and realism" (the repeating of landscape, herbal remedies etc.) and the "melodramtic and fantasy" of this series. I was hoping for more of the "fantastic and dramatised" element in this book but it wasn't to be. And when I think, perhaps Auel is really trying to depict, a closer telling of what life would have been like in the IceAge, I guess this book, is not so bad.
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Summary: Extensive Research Shines Through
Review: Jean Auel's extensive research shines through in this latest book in the Earth's Children series.
One of the things I loved about the first book, "Clan of the Cave Bear" was Auel's unique take on how the clan and the "others" discovered new ways to hunt, cook, process organic materials, and so on. Besides enjoying an interesting plot line, we, the readers, were introduced to a whole new way of looking at life as it might have been lived in prehistoric times.
"Shelters of Stone" harks back to that first book with its insight into how the link may have been formed between prehistoric humans and the people we are today. I have read other reviews of the book which decry the absence of an action-filled plot. I disagree. I enjoyed "Shelters of Stone" exactly as it was written.
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Summary: The best thing about this hardback is the endflap maps
Review: Unlike most of the gang here, I only "discovered" Jean Auel's books about a month ago. I picked up Plains of Passage and was enthralled with Ms. Auel's delightful way of bringing human pre-history into a believable story. I went out and bought the first three books to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and enjoyed them all immensely. Having then read the whole series up to book #4, I decided to splurge and treat myself to a hardcover of JA's latest Shelters of Stone.Unfortunately, I was extremely disappointed in this 741-page tome. I have to agree with most of the negative reviews here. I think the most frustrating aspect for me about this book is that JA layed the groundwork for some potentially interesting plot twists with the characters of Marona, Brukeval, Laramar and Madroman and the white quartz cave, but then failed to use them to create anything more than minor tension in the plot. I get the feeling that she was just setting the stage for book #6, but if SoS is any indication, she'll have to reintroduce all those potential villains in the next book anyway, so we'll be stuck with more copy and paste boilerplate in book six. Did I say the best thing about this was the endflap maps? Actually, they would have been much more useful if they had included the names and locations of each of the Zelandonii caves on the maps instead of just their place names. Also, having all the Zelandonia with the same name only differentiated by cave number was bad enough, but then she sticks in the four Zelondoni of the 29th cave to really confuse things. I agree with some of the other reviewers: Zelondoni of the 9th Cave was the most interesting new character in the book -- kind of a cross between Mother Superior and Bloody Mary in South Pacific. It's a shame JA has returned Jondalar to being Ayla's two-dimensional sex slave -- I really liked the way JA fleshed him out as a confused and jealous lover in Mammoth Hunters. Now that (Mammoth Hunters) was a really thoughtful illustration of the problems we all face in communicating our feelings and how easy it is to let a simple misunderstanding spiral out of control. Will I buy book #6? Probably, as long as it doesn't take another 12 years to write.
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Summary: Rehash...Rehash
Review: I was totally dissapointed by this book. It lacked originality and adventure as the other previous 4 books provided. The 700 some odd pages of introductions and rehash of the other books was totally boring . I almost put the book aside, but kept reading expecting something interesting to happen, but did not.
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Summary: You Can Skip this One
Review: I really wanted to love this book. I treasured the first book of the series. And, I sort of put up with the rest. But, this one was brutal to get through. Jean Auel seems to think that her readers are so dense that we need to read everything five times before we'll remember it. If she had taken out all the excess repeat text, the book would easily be 25% as long. I felt I had to finish the book, since I had devoted so much time to the series, but I was joyous when I was done.
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