Rating: 
Summary: Jean, Get a New Editor!
Review: After waiting 12 years for the next book in the series, I eagerly started plowing through it. Jean Auel is an excellent researcher, and I am very interested in what life was/may have been like for our ur-ancestors. But she is no novelist! The love scenes, introductions, relationships, pop-psychology, what a pot-boiler! This book should have been 1/2 the length. So much happened in the first few days of their return, that it took her 1/2 the 741 pages to tell and retell it. Disappointing, but then, all of the books have been since "The Clan of the Cave Bear." She just runs out of steam.
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Summary: Shelters of Stone......
Review: I too was a little dissapointed in the repeativness (is that a word?) throughout the book. It seems that the first half just repeats all of the other four books over and over again, but then when the new stuff comes, it gets interesting again. It is a must read or there will be unfinished circumstances that should get told and they finally do in this last? book. Let's start a new Project Ms. Auel, and I will be first in line. You are an amazing writer.
Rating: 
Summary: I honestly don't know what to think of this book
Review: I have waited, like everybody else, SO LONG for the continuation of the series and built my hopes SO HIGH, that it was, I guess, inevitable that the book would be a bit of a disappointment.The bits and pieces that were new and original were far and few in between large chunks of recycled paragraphs. So I found myself skipping pages to come to some new information. On the other hand, mistakes aside, it is still a fascinating read, albeit a bit flawed one - why, all of a sudden, Ms Auel feels that she has to show that Ayla rolls her r's? This is a new and unwelcome development which only appears once in a while. I mean, either she does or she doesn't! That said, I am keeping my fingers crossed that book 6 will answer all our questions and finally quench our thirst.
Rating: 
Summary: A rip off
Review: Waited years for this book. What a disappointment. It is boring, repetitive, and has no story. I don't think that the same person wrote this book as wrote the first four. It stinks and I want my money back for the TWO COPIES I bought.
Rating:
Summary: Not the best..not the worst
Review: I was so excited when this book came out. 11 1/2 years was so long to wait. I thought that there were many interesting parts to the book, but that overall, the book lacked the excitement of some of the earlier ones. However, I must say that I am looking forward to the next book, given that Ayla's life has taken an amazing turn and has a promise of greatness and drama.
Rating: 
Summary: Not the best of her books
Review: Like many fans of the Earth's Children series, I eagerly awaited the publication of Shelters of Stone, after being quite disappointed in Plains of Passage, on both first and second readings. I was hoping that Ms. Auel would once again hit the stride from the first three books, but, alas, while an improvement over Plains, Shelters is largely a description out in search of a story. It appears to be a pastich of large chunks of previous books for the two or three people out there who might not have read the first four, endless and tedious "formal introductions" that read like the Biblical "begats," plus lots of her research materials and descriptions that she felt a deep need to share, lightly encased in a fairly forgetable boy gets girl, girl gets acceptance story. Lacking in the intricate interplay of characters of the earlier books, peopled with largely cardboard figures (Zolena/Zelandonii being something of an exception), I must say I was disappointed. I may wait for the library or the paperback next time. You may want to as well, for this one.
Rating:
Summary: The Shelters of Stone
Review: Shame on you, Jean. After 12 years of waiting this was a huge disappointment. No action, nothing new. I've re-read the other books in the series over the past 12 yrs., but will not be re-reading this one! Sorry I bought it. Should've just borrowed it from the library.
Rating:
Summary: Nostalgia trip
Review: As I was reading this rather thick volume in record time, I realized that it was NINETEEN years since I'd read CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR. So much has happened to me and Ayla in that time, and it was a lot like becoming reaquainted with an old friend. The references to earlier stories was helpful, albeit repetitive at times, but I'm anxiously awaiting the final book to see what kind of a Zelandoni Ayla becomes, and what happens between the zelandonii and the Clan people...
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Summary: Pre-Historic Nancy Drew meets Kama Sutra
Review: What a disappointment!! I really expected a story, plot & character development after a 12 year wait and 800 pages. What I got was a boring formula written book with lots of rehashing of old material and characters turned into cartoons of themselves. The one good thing that came from this book is that now I don't like any of the characters and really don't care what happens to them! I'm cured!
Rating:
Summary: I Waited Twelve Years for This Drivel?
Review: My first reaction when I finally turned the last page of "The Shelters of Stone" was "I waited twelve years for THIS?" Indeed, the only thing that made me stick with the reading until the last page was the forlorn hope that Auel would stop repeating herself and maybe something interesting would happen. Like many "Earth's Children" fans, I waited with bated breath to see what might finally happen when the sexy cave hero Jondalar brings the even sexier cave heroine Ayla back home to meet his people. We'd already been led in previous books to believe that Ayla's introduction to the Zelandoni would be anything but smooth. The Zelandoni (we have been told) believe that the Neanderthals who raised Ayla are animals and any children produced from Neanderthal-Human trysts are "abominations." Particularly intriguing were what we imagined might happen when Ayla met Jondalar's old love, Zolena (who is now "Zelandoni of the Ninth Cave," and who in a mere five years has become a gargatuan image of the woman Jondalar loved; so we no longer have to anticipate a conflict between Ayla and the most powerful Zelandoni priestess. Would've been fascinating, but oh well!), his old ex-fiancee Marona, and his powerful but prideful mother, Marthona. How would Ayla, whom we know as fiercely protective of her Neanderthal adoptive family, react to a people who might judge her based on her past history with these "animals?" We couldn't wait to find out! And what would Jondalar do, who in previous books was torn between his intense love for Ayla and his worry over what his family might think? Oh please tell us! So, what happened? Ayla meets Jondalar's family. They think she's kind of strange, but nice (several of them fall in love with her). Ayla meets the rest of Jondalar's people. They think she's kind of strange, but nice(several of them fall in love with her). She goes to the Summer meeting and meets a lot of other people. Mostly, they all think she's kind of strange, but nice (several of them fall in love with her.) A few think she's kind of strange and are intensely jealous that everyone else thinks she's nice ... although it is made clear that anyone who doesn't love Ayla has serious problems. One of these is the Cave drunk, who lusts after her body but is offended because she's given more status than he. Then there's the ex-fiance Marona, a character who isn't even believably realistic. She turns out to be a pouty,juvinile acting brat whom one doubts Jondalar would have ever actually had anything to do with. The meeting of ex-fiancee and Ayla is so predictable it took effort to get through it. Truth be told, the entire book took so much effort to get through that I skipped or skimmed large sections ... something this reader rarely ever does! The *best* thing about the former books was the intensely erotic love scenes. I once thought that Auel wrote better erotica than anyone else I'd ever read. Well, something happened between the last book and this one because even the cave-love has lost it's draw. While an intergral part of former stories, the erotic scenes in this installment seem almost an afterthought, as if Auel would rather be writing something else (such as another endlessly detailed description of the making of cave-objects, baskets, mats, clothing and the like)and inserted the love-scene only because she knew the readers expected it. About the endless descriptiveness, especially of early human culture: a bit of this is fine and added to the original book's appeal, but it almost seems as if "Shelters" was written so that Auel could exhibit her meticulous research and theories as to how life was lived then, as if the story was a mere frame for a display of the research, rather than the other way around. If I want to learn every detail of how to live like a cave-man, I'll take a survival course. I buy a novel to be entertained! Tell me a story! Even the animals, formerly the real charmers of the stories, succumbed to this book's long-windedness. Do we really have to be told *every* time Ayla goes to check on the horses? Do we really need repeated descriptions of how astounded people are when they first see tame animals? Do we really have to hear the story of how Ayla discovered domestication of animals as many times as this book subjects us to it? Even the attempt at tear-jerking fails; every crisis encountered in the book is resolved so anti-climactically we drop our hankies unused. The constant repition of a "poem" in the book ("The Earth Mother's Song")annoyed me to no end. Auel ought to leave poetry to people who know that craft, yet she is so infatuated with her own amateur-quality poem that she repeats it constantly and in fact even has a special repeat of it all by itself at the end of the book. Late in the book Ayla delivers her baby and promptly names her without stirring a single emotion. Nothing like the dramatic and soul-searing deliver of Durc, her half-Neanderthal son, in the hallowed 1st book, "Clan of the Cave Bear." Auel makes many references to the need to live in harmony with the environment throughout her entire series. She might've done the environment a favor and not written 700+ pages of pure drivel. If she wanted to bore us she could've done so in 300 pages or less. Or better yet, just issued a press release saying she didn't really know where to go with this story anymore, because it seems obvious that she doesn't. Yawn.
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