Rating: 
Summary: Repetitive and Unbelievable
Review: I read the third book in spite of how much I disliked the second one. I figured if the third one was ok I would take the average of the three and move forward. Mammoth Hunters was a little more interesting than Valley of Horses simply because there are more characters to focus on. But overall I can't say I really enjoyed this book either. While I like the idea of anything out of the ordinary, I am also a realist. The more realistic elements a story has-in spite of its oddities-the more memorable and enjoyable, in my humble opinion. I think it takes great ability to craft believable stories from out-of-the-ordinary ideas. With that said...This series definitely shows that Auel has a great mind for researching and remembering facts and information, she is obviously quite a scholar. The idea of writing a novel series about this particular period in time is a great idea and some of the minor details of the world she has created are very clever, however, her ability to craft a believable, stimulating story with deep, believable and multifaceted characters, around the information she presents is highly questionable. Honestly, I cannot believe these books were bestsellers. My main gripes: First, the whole relational struggle between Jondalar and Ayla is just plain stupid. They are living with the Mamutoi who are supposedly very open and frank, often times asking terribly personal questions to satisfy curiosities, and yet NO ONE in this unbelievably open society was willing to say anything about a misunderstanding that was so blatant??? Totally inconsistent and annoying. The way Auel resolves relational conflict of any kind is extremely evasive. The relational struggles of the Mamutoi before the summer meeting and then during are always resolved by Ayla displaying some sort of superiority to the others and they are simply marveled into quiet idolatry. Voila! Conflict resolved. Not exactly what I would call realistic. And the lion shows up at just the right time. How convenient. Not only that, but the way she eventually resolves the ultimate conflict between Ayla and Jondalar is so anticlimactic that you wonder why she spent 600 pages building up to it. While it's true that individuals outside of a collective are often times more creative and innovative in some ways out of necessity, and quick to break cultural molds that may inspire awe in those more ingrained in a strict social structure, Auel takes this concept to an unbelievable extreme. Second, the animal behavior is just ridiculous and probably the most fictitious part of the story. Wolves and dogs are as different behaviorally as dogs and cats are. While it *may* be true that dogs evolved from domesticated wolves, Auel takes thousands of years of evolutionary leaps in one fell swoop and suddenly our "Wolf" is wriggling and waging his tail, drooling no doubt, and playing fetch with the children. Ayla must have special powers indeed! What an amazing woman! Granted, not everyone has had the opportunity to raise a wolf pup to adulthood, but I can tell you from experience that Auel's Wolf doesn't act like a wolf. Especially in his interactions with Ayla-particularly when scolded-who is the alpha female. Lastly... Pedantry. Ugh. The thing that made this book most unbearable is the fact that Auel underestimates her readers in the extreme. Instead of making a point A and then moving, at a later time in the story, to a logical point B and letting the reader fill in the blanks, she presents all of the background information with the new point, again and again and again to make sure you get it. Every time she introduces a new part of the logical progression she gives you A, B, and then C. Next time, it's A, B, C and then D. No jumping just to D. No, we must first endure paragraph after paragraph (and some times page after page) of the same material, with almost identical phrasings to the previous diatribe, before she gets to the next point. For example (only one of many), we are all acutely aware of the issues with clan women hunting and how Ayla felt about that. It was THE issue in the first book. It was discussed thoroughly in the second book. Why must we hear it again and again and again every time a new hunting situation comes up???? Surely a person of average intelligence can connect the dots! This quality of her storytelling gets really, really, really old after a very short time.
Rating: 
Summary: Ayla's story is going downhill
Review: Auel's writing was entertaining enough to keep me interested throughout two thirds of the book. Then I got bored and skip-read the rest, suspecting that the "fateful decision" announced in the inside cover (of the hardcover edition) would be something very predictable, namely Ayla and Jon settling their petty squabble, having sex, and riding off into the sunset on Whinny, their (not quite white) horse. The book was a nice easy read for a rainy Sunday, though, and it didn't annoy me too much, so I'm giving it three stars.
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.
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