The Land of the Painted Caves by Jean Auel: A review
Jean M. Auel's first book in her "Earth's Children" series, The Clan of the Cave Bear , was published in 1980, and introduced Ayla, a Cro-Magnon child who had lost her family in a earthquake. She was found by a group of Neanderthals, the Clan of the Cave Bear, who took her in and raised her. It was a well-written and thoroughly researched book which brought the people of that prehistorical period to life. In the next ten years, Auel published three more books in the series: The Valley of Horses ; The Mammoth Hunters ; and The Plains of Passage . The books continued to show the author's attention to getting the details of prehistoric life plausible and as correct as possible, and they contained a wealth of information about how those lives may have been lived. But by the fourth book, the series was definitely running out of steam. Twelve years passed before Auel completed the fifth book in the series, The Shelters of Stone , in which Ayla and her lover, Jondalar, w...