The Shelters of Stone (Earth's Children, 5)

Rating:
Summary: Major let down
Review: ...The book is more about Auel's hypothesis of what the region looked like, and how people lived, than it is and actual story. No build up. No climax. This title is a best seller because we all expected it to live up to the last four books. Unfortunately, it doesn't come close. This is the last of the series I spend good money on.

Rating:
Summary: milking the earlier novels
Review: why do we read this novel? presumably because we've grown so fond of jondalar and ayla and their unique companions. valley of the horses was a wonderful story about a young woman's ability to survive through her imagination, creativity, determination, and a myriad of skills and values that she gained from the neanderthals who adopted her as a child. yes, the interwoven chapters about jondalar lead inexorably to their meeting. and the superficial tension surrounding her approaching marriage to another man in the mammoth hunters pretty much fills out that novel. but beginning in mammoth hunters and in passage of the plains, we spend so much time repititiously watching every new group of people react to ayla and her animals -- gadzooks, that woolf makes me uncomfortable; how strange to see her riding my dinner; and, wow and wow again, what a powerful woman she must be! yes, of course we enjoy this! we love ayla! we don't care if she and jondalar are conveniently responsible for three or four of the greatest innovations of the paleolithic era. irrelevant. well, this same obsession pervades shelters of stone. a saving grace is auel's having ayla fiercely defend the neandrathal-flatheads. this is admirable and an early moral equivalent of attacking racism. but goodness, here jondalar and ayla go again in this next chapter, meeting new people and going thru the whole reaction to the animals and wow that woman's powerful syndrome. so much of the last two novels has been horribly repetitive in this regard. shelters of stone's plot seems to barely get beyond this repetition. yes, our concern is with ayla's increasingly being accepted and respected by everyone. and yes, given her experiences with the cave bear clan, psychologically this makes super sense and we cheer her on every step of the way. that's what keeps us reading this stuff. she's a fantastic and most lovable human being who has made it on her own and done it the hard way! we just have to put up with so much repetitive blather to get there. but wait! there may be hope with the next novel: it's clear ayla's about to become, not just a zelandoni but the zelandoni of all zelandoniiiisss. shaman of all shamans, lover of all lovers, mother of all mothers. and as such, she's bound to deal with the flathead issue once and for all! oh.... i wonder how people's fascination, fear, awe of her relationship with the animals will play then?

Rating:
Summary: only OK
Review: As the other reviewers note, this installment was a let-down. After a 10-year wait for it, I'd imagined great things from an author I'd previously enjoyed. However, my guess is that some of the snippets of character development and interaction will be key to the denoument of the story. So even though the writing is not as compelling as it had been, I still felt compelled to read the whole thing.

Rating:
Summary: ho-hum
Review: I had to buy this book as soon as I spotted it on the store shelf because I had absolutely loved the first four books of the series. I kept waiting for something significant to happen all the way through the story and was disappointed when nothing did. There was too much repetition throughout the whole book, from the presentation of the characters lengthy formal titles when they were introduced to one another each and every time, to Ayla's flashbacks of her visit to the spirit world with her former clan's mogur, to Zelandoni's Earth Mother's song/poem, and Ayla and Jondular's lovemaking scenarios. I will have no desire to read any more of the series if Jean M. Auel decides to continue with it.

Rating:
Summary: Falling short...
Review: The excellence of the first 4 books of this series set my expectations for the 5th book. I however am quite disappointed. The characters/situations/nuances are not nearly as well-developed as in prior books. I agree with other reviewers: it is as if Auel is not even the writer here. I understand that there will be a 6th book in the series. I will consider very carefully before deciding to read the next book.

Rating:
Summary: From Jean Auel?
Review: I think not. It's not a book, it only looks like one.
What a disappointment.
Truly hope Ms. Auel reads some of the reader reviews here.
(I did read all her previous works and really looked forward for this one - duhhh)

Rating:
Summary: I waited years for this!?!
Review: I loved Auel's other books. In fact I have read The Clan of the Cave Bear so many times that the cover has fallen off. Despite the fact that I was basically willing to love SoS no matter what happened in the story, Auel did the one and only thing that could have made me not like this book, she wrote badly. SoS was boring and very slow moving,with no real central story to keep the reader's attention. There are about 50 new characters, and none of them are interesting. Things that the reader already knows are repeated over and over again. Want a list? How Ayla grew up with the Clan, how Jondalar and Ayla met and how she healed him, how she found out about firestones, how they made a spear thrower, people's titles, and to top it all of a really long and boring Mother song. I counted four times Ayla told the story of how she came to have a horse. But I could have missed a time or two, I started skipping over the long descriptions around page 300. The worst thing of all is that Ayla and Jondalar have become, well, boring. They are apparently incapable of doing any wrong. They go from place to place spreading the inventions only they were smart enough to think of and showing people the errors of their ways. They are always described as the most beautiful couple and are the best at everything they do. I think that if I met a couple like them in the real world they would annoy me, not inspire me. But after all is said and I done I understand that if you have been waiting for this book as long as I was no review is going to stop you from reading it. But for your own good just trust me, save your money and wait for it in paperback. You waited years for this terrible book, another few months won't hurt.

Rating:
Summary: A Must Not Read
Review: This was the worst book Auel has ever written. The characters where ill defined, and nothing really much happened. Ayla had her baby! Big whoop. The whole story was basically about how Great and beautiful Ayla was and how handsome Jondalar was. Even the sex scenes were beginning to be all the same. As i mentioned before, Auel did a terrible job on defining her characters. I never once felt like i knew any of the other characters in her book. She didn't tell enough about Brukeval and his problems, and that could have been great.She didn't get enough time to make any friends with the other women either. She made it seem also that Ayla and Jondalar were the perfect man and woman. Ayla had so many great inventions, she could talk to animals, she was the prettiest woman ever! Oh come on! there is only so much one woman could be, and there is no woman that is so beautiful that everyone is just besotted with her. And they made it seem like she had special powers or something. She didn't! Auel also repeated herself in this book. It was like; we know who Ayla is, we don't need her to recite all her titles again. Auel probably spent have the book introducing people. It was absolutely ridicoulous. No one is that gorgeous, no one is that smart, and no one is that lucky. If Jean M. Auel already hadn't been a world famous aurthor, this book would have never hit the shelves. This was definetly not a book to wait six years on. And the people who did waste six years waiting were badly disappointed. From the way this book was written, i'd say Auel spent a hurried month on it, and not the six years traviling to Europe for "research" like she said.

Rating:
Summary: This book was a bit too redundant.
Review: I think Jean Auel is an awesome writer. However, I think this book focused way too much on "how amazing" Ayla was in the eyes of all the other characters. I adored Ayla in "Clan of the Cave Bear," and "Valley of Horses." (I have read those two books over and over again.) In this book, Ayla seems too subdued, or not really shining through, as in her previous books. I agreed with one reviewer which stated that Ayla spent too much time explaining and retelling what all of Auel's readers had already read in her previous books. I probably will never re-read this book. I still love Jean Auel and Ayla!

Rating:
Summary: The editor that passed on this book should retire!
Review: It's easy to recommend CLAN of the CAVE BEAR. However, J.A.'s follow ups were a bit disappointing and wading through this repetitious tome is a total time waste.