Rating: 
Summary: Flatheads Like Your Readers
Review: Jean Auel's absence from the marketplace for twelve years has turned out to be a blessing for her devoted readers. This book demonstrates in spades the problem with almost all serial writing for profit. Like Robert Jordan's ten volume fantasy series, the first few books are great, and then the writer runs out of fresh new ideas. The result is evident. The writer repeats the same ideas over and over again with no new entertaining plot. There is no character development or any plot to this book. Jean Auel's attempt to depict how prehistoric peoples might have thought and behaved is not realistic, and doesn't appear to be based on good scientific research that took twelve years. Her repetition at least ten times of how the heroine starts a fire from flint becomes very boring. The book is overall neither fun nor interesting. The psychedelic religious trip in the cave is, however, well done. Her style of writing is also not up to par with her first few books in this series. I would not recommend this book even if you liked the first few or the first four books in the series. I will not be buying the sixth book, and supposedly and (hopefully) last book in this series, although I own first editions of the first four books in this series, and will keep those. I am getting rid of this book as it will take up to much room in my collection.
Rating: 
Summary: Gift Books
Review: Bought 2 copies of this continuing saga for birthday presents. They were read enthusiastically by the recipients and I'm told the book was great.
Rating:
Summary: Ho-Hum...
Review: I personally bought this book, read it all the way through, and have read all of Jean Auel's previous books in this series. Of them, "The Valley of Horses" (arguably her best book) was terrifically engaging, mainly because the sexual tension between Ayla and Jondalar was so intense...every reader MUST have had an orgasm when the characters FINALLY did. However, it must be said that "Shelters of Stone" probably is a waste of time and money. Among its most noticeable flaws are these: The overuse of the verb "noticed". Ayla was forever "noticing" something. The constant repetition of the word/title "Zelandonii" in all its applications was highly annoying. The "Martha Steward" aspect of cave life, according to the author, was hard to swallow. Should we really believe Cro-Magnon people CARED about such things as shelves, decorated partitions, nice plates and cups? The weather was always fine. Give me a break...let it be cold and damp once in a while. Just about everything that occurred was rehashed at least twice again later on in the narrative. Whinney, Ayla's horse, is a "Przwalski horse" according to the list of characters (more correctly a "Przewalskii horse"), yet her offspring, Racer, is a "Cherski horse (rare)" according to the same list. If this is a real species (1) Whinney must have founded the strain for the story or (2) it is so obscure that none of the references on equine evolution mention it. Maybe it's supposed to be a color variation. Another hard-to-swallow event is the "summer meeting", where we are asked to envision a camp of over 2,000 people, all camping and foraging in the same area for a season. Just think of the sanitation problems! Ayla goes bison hunting on Whinney with all her baskets of herbs? Hard to believe everything didn't fall out at a gallop, not to mention the poor mare had to carry extra baggage. Lastly, all the characters have three syllable names (except Ayla and her animals, for some reason)and, once you notice THAT, it's hard to concentrate on the story and keep a straight face at the same time. This could be a good "beach book", it's certainly long enough, and you can stop anywhere and pick it up days later with no problem. Nothing ever really happens in the entire 754 pages to engage the reader and make him/her CARE. One final slam...the cover art is pretty inaccurate and disappointing. Yes, I probably will buy/read the next/final volume, sucker that I am. Hopefully, Mz. Auel can find it in her heart to forgive my luke-warm review. My apologies.
Rating:
Summary: Greed One, Fans Zero
Review: I can't add much to the other negative reviews, except to say that if Ms. Auel couldn't give her thousands of faithful fans an effort worthy of the previous books, she should have just let it (and us) go. If Jean Auel actually wrote this, then something is very, very wrong with her. Shame on her editor(s) and the publisher of this truly atrocious book, for wasting the money and, what's worse, the time of Ms. Auel's fans. I guess what with the ready made market, greed got the better of everyone involved. Well, they got my money this time. I hope they put it in the bank, because they won't get it again.
Rating: 
Summary: Ayla arrives at Jondalar's home and that's about it...
Review: I too have been following the Earth's Children Series right along, although I knew when I finished "The Clan of the Cave Bear" that Jean M. Auel was never, ever, going to top that book. Not only was that a masterful combination of archeological knowledge regarding the lives of Neanderthals with the creative inspiration of their peculiar memories, but the story is so powerful on a mythic level being a retelling of the expulsion of Eve from the Garden of Eden (think about it: Ayla is cast out several times having to do with her violation of gender roles). When I started reading "The Valley of Horses" it was obvious that the characters we met in the first two chapters, Ayla and Jondalar respectively, were eventually go to meet (and probably have really great sex). By the end of that novel we knew that eventually Jondalar was going to take Ayla back to his people, the Zelandoni. At the end of "The Plains of Passage" they had finally arrived at his home, and that is where "The Shelters of Stone" picks up.The biggest issue for me while reading "The Shelters of Stone" was figuring out what the book was about. At face value it would seem to simply have to do with the acceptance of Ayla by the Zelandoni. After all, she has a funny accent, has a trained wolf and horses, and has the habit of stubbornly insisting that flatheads are human beings. Although Ayla wins over most of the camp, including the more powerful members, there are several individuals who end up holding pretty big grudges against her and I spent most of the book expecting something horrible to happen to somebody although none of these potential villains is anywhere close to being in the class of Broud. As for Ayla herself, she repeatedly insists that all she wants to do is mate Jondalar and bear his baby (Ayla knows that this idea that spirits create babies is a big misconception). Therefore I was surprised, and rather pleasantly I must admit, when it turns out that is Ayla's ability to be accepting of something new that turns out to define the novel's climax. Although I did not read the foreword until after completing the novel, I thought it was interesting that Auel wrote this book somewhat differently. Since the locations are based on real prehistoric caves she has visited in the south of France, Auel wrote the descriptions first, to ensure their accuracy before proceeding with her narrative. But while the accuracy of the geography is well grounded, Auel creativity has broken loose big time in terms of prehistoric music. Auel has written a lengthy work called "The Mother's Song," which pops up several times in the novel and is reprinted in its entirety in the back. Here is where Auel is going way beyond the scant evidence preserved in the archeological record to flesh out her characters and the world in which they live. Still, in the final analysis, in this book the archeological information ends up being more important than the narrative, albeit pretty much by default. Perhaps the greatest irony of "The Shelters of Stone" is that now that Ayla and Jondalar have finished their journey they not only spend a lot of time telling about what happened on their trip, but most of what happens in this novel recalls similar events in early volumes in the Earth's Children Series. Ayla continues to look out for the weak and helpless, especially for any child considered "deformed" by the community, and if the reader does not draw a similarity to what happened in earlier books with Durc and Rydec, then Ayla will draw the explicit comparison for them. There are actually more flashbacks than sex scenes this time around. The worst thing I can say about this book is that for the first time I finished one of Auel's novels and did not have special scenes that I wanted to go back and read (Tom Clancy did the same thing in his last Jack Ryan novel and he has me worried as well). Apparently there is one more volume to go to complete the story of Ayla, and for the first time I have some idea as to what the ultimate climax must be. Certainly the next volume will have to have more going on in it that "The Shelters of Stone," which will take additional hits for because it provides so little to fans of Auel's heroine after so long a wait. Maybe once we read that final book and are better able to gauge what Auel was setting up in this current volume, we will have a better appreciation for this fifth book. But for now it is pretty much the literary equivalent of treading water.
Rating:
Summary: We all waited over 10 years for this??
Review: Well, I'm glad I wasn't holding my breath for this one. What a disappointment. The plot (such as it is) takes so long to unfold it isn't funny. Much of the book is just revision of events in previous books. While this may have been somewhat justified (after all, it's been a long time since the last one), the stories really only needed to be repeated once. But instead, Ayla and Jondalar repeat the same information at great length to various people over and over again. Surely "Ayla explained about finding Wolf" would have done, rather than a three paragraph reminiscence every time someone new was startled by Wolf. The long descriptions of pretty much everything in Ayla's environment also became wearing for me. While most of the interest in the books is reading about how humans used to live, the amount of description and way it is phrased was a bit much for me. In one passage the author actually referred to the sun as 'the shining orb', which left me thinking of Flora Post's tortured literary efforts in Cold Comfort Farm. It was also amusing to note that Jondalar's sexual technique has not varied in the slightest since the previous books - apparently he is a one-trick pony. Although I genuinely like the characters of Ayla and Jondalar, this book was dull reading for a lot of the time, and not in the same league as Clan of the Cave Bear.
Rating:
Summary: A terrible disappointment after so long a wait
Review: I have read most of the reviews and agree with most of them that it was a literary disaster.It's difficult to believe that after a twelve year hiatus this was the result. The book is boring ,repeating the saga of the previous books seemingly without end. Much of the story is concerned with repetitive long introductions which do nothing to advance a story line which never develops. Let's finish with the medicinal value of the herbs,the wild animals as pets,the rocks and topography and the startling new weapons. We have been through that in our previous journey with the perfect couple. What I waited for was Ayala's encounter with the clan and her son Durc ; and not an entire story only devoted to family introductions and a summer picnic.It appears the author is losing her focus.
Rating:
Summary: *yawn*
Review: It seems that Auel was being paid by the word in this 5th book in her series. There is so much repetition and review that a fan of her previous books could skip pages at a time and not miss a single thing. Shallow characters, NO engrossing story lines or characture clashes, and not more than a glimpse of Ayla and Jondalar's new life together. Boring. Take out all the mindless erotica (that I skip anyway and always have), and about half of the flora and fauna descriptions, and every single recitation of the poem, and you will have a 100 page book to segway on to book number 6. I rushed to get one of the first hardback copies of this book. It was a waste of money and reading time. For the next addition to the series, I'll put my name on the waiting list at the library....if there even is one.
Rating:
Summary: A Constant Insult to the Intelligence
Review: Oh Dear, I don't know about the rest of you readers, but this book stunned me with how bad it was. I have fond memories of reading clan as a 10 year old, but on re-reading that I have to say it now seemed flawed and unusually silly to me. The ludicrous perfection of Ayla's character is present even in the early novel, and I now find myself wondering how much of Shelters poor reception is due to its audience maturing and increasing in literary awareness over the long Aul-less years, and how much is due to the (undoubted) lower quality of the writing herein.
Rating: 
Summary: Enough already?
Review: Only reason to continue the series at this point would be to see how many pages it takes for Ayla to invent The Wheel (and is anyone else as irritated as I am by the constant capitalized spellings for nearly every activity from ceremonies to having sex?) Seriously, I can guess why Auel is constantly rehashing material from earlier books--to hide the lack of a story or interesting new characters--and I had particularly looked forward to meeting Zelandoni, the other great love of Jondalar's life. For an entertaining and far quicker read on the subject of Stone Age life, read Joan Wolf's trilogy(Daughter of the Red Deer, The Horsemasters, The Reindeer Hunters). I've recently reread the book, and while still giving only two stars, I must say that it reads faster the second time around--maybe because of knowing which segments to skip over altogether!
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