Reviews - Riverside Public Library

Booklist Reviews

Twelve years after The Plains of Passage (1990), Auel returns to the prehistoric world she introduced in The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980). The fifth book in the series picks up where the last one left off, with her heroine, Ayla, a young woman who was found and raised by people known as the Clan, and her betrothed, Jondalar, arriving at the place of Jondalar's people. Ayla is apprehensive about meeting her beloved's people--they look down on those who raised her, referring to them as "flatheads." Jondalar's family is welcoming and even impressed by the exotic young woman he has brought home. They are stunned by her ability to command animals; she and Jondalar each have a horse, and, even more impressive, she has a loyal wolf. But not all accept Ayla, and Jondalar's former lover, Marona, plays a cruel trick on her. Ayla's natural gifts as a healer make themselves apparent on a hunt, and Zelandoni, the spiritual healer, sees her potential, but Ayla's focus is on her coming mating with Jondalar and the birth of their child. Although readers will undoubtedly be cheered by the arrival of the fifth book, it lacks the drive and sense of questing of the previous books, since Ayla and Jondalar have reached their destination. But that won't deter fans of the series, so expect this to be in high demand. ((Reviewed March 15, 2002)) Copyright 2002 Booklist Reviews

BookPage Reviews

Jean Auel's modern Stone Age family rolls on

Let's dispense with the gossip straight away: Jean Auel lives. Speculation concerning her demise by various, even nefarious, means has dogged the 66-year-old Portland, Oregon, novelist throughout the 11 years it has taken her to complete The Shelters of Stone, book five in the projected six-book Earth's Children series that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear in 1980.

"None of the rumors are true," Auel sighs good-naturedly over the phone. "I have not been killed by farm equipment. I have not been assassinated. I have not had every disease known to man. I have not had a fight with my publisher. I have not divorced my husband; as a matter of fact, we're coming up on 48 years."

She well appreciates the concern of fans who have waited what seems like an Ice Age for the next generous helping of the prehistoric adventures of Ayla, a tall, blond Cro-Magnon medicine woman, and her dashing soul mate, Jondalar. Every time a tentative publication date would lapse, another round of dire rumors would circulate on fan Web sites around the world.

The long wait ends

The Shelters of Stone, all 700-plus pages of it, will land like Stone Age tablets in bookstores worldwide on April 30. What's more, fans will be delighted to learn they won't have to wait another 12 years for book six.

"One of the things that took some extra time was that I actually did a rough draft to the end of the series so I could see where I was going," she says. "Some of it is fairly finished, none of it is absolutely finished, some of it is just suggestive, but I have actually now realized that the ending of the series is going to be different than I originally thought."

In Shelters, weary travelers Ayla and Jondalar finally arrive at the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii, Jondalar's home, after making their way through The Valley of Horses (1982), spending a season among The Mammoth Hunters (1985) and completing the perilous journey across The Plains of Passage (1990).

Having reached the Cro-Magnon version of the Big Apple, Ayla finally meets the in-laws and prepares for her formal mating with Jondalar at the Summer Meeting. Ayla faces intense scrutiny by his people; her ability to domesticate her horse and pet wolf intrigue them but her upbringing as an orphan among Neanderthals scares them. Likewise, she finds their language, customs and stone cave condos equally exotic. Together, Ayla and Jondalar must work to find their place among the Zelandonii and prepare for the birth of their first child.

It has been 22 years since Auel (pronounced owl) first hit the bestseller lists with The Clan of the Cave Bear. At the time, no one was looking for fiction set in the Stone Age, much less 200,000 words on the subject by a first-timer.

Is Auel surprised to find herself with a cult following today?

"Wouldn't you be?" she laughs. "Actually, if I had planned to write a bestseller back in 1980, would I have picked a Paleolithic caveman? No, I would have done some Hollywood glitz or some mysteries. Nobody expected it. They said yes, we think it's a good story, but we just don't think anybody short of [James] Michener should write books that long. They just didn't think it would sell enough." She certainly proved them wrong. The series has sold 34 million copies worldwide.

Auel clearly tapped into a post-feminist appetite for strong, independent female role models. Forget equality; Ayla's got the power throughout these books, a fact best reflected by the growing list of babies named after her.

Self-determination, will and perseverance are all qualities Auel shares with her prehistoric heroine. Married at age 18 to her high school sweetheart Ray, Auel had five children before she was 25 years old. She wanted more from life than housework, but wasn't sure she had what it took. After a chance reading of an article in Life magazine, she took a home IQ test. One year later, she was accepted into Mensa, whose membership represents the smartest two percent of the population.

Back when she had the time, Auel liked attending Mensa gatherings.

"I used to love it because this was one place where you could just talk to anybody about anything," she says. "Sometimes there'd be a whole bunch of people in the kitchen telling dirty jokes, but using plays on words and puns, not gross ones."

She worked her way up in a Portland electronics plant from keypunch operator to circuit board designer, technical writer and credit manager. She took night school classes in physics and math at Portland State and earned her MBA from the University of Portland in 1976 at age 40.

That's when the idea for a short story about a prehistoric orphan girl changed her life. As Auel steeped herself in the Pleistocene epoch (roughly 25,000-35,000 years ago), the story grew into a 450,000-word "outline" for six books based on Ayla's adventures.

"I've always had this over-arcing story to the series; it's never been gee, Clan was successful, so let's write Clan 2 and Clan 3 and Rocky 4. I always realized I had more than one book," she says.

Through the years, Auel has maintained an upside-down work regimen one might expect from, say, Stephen King or Anne Rice. Her typical day?

"For one thing, it's a typical night. I am, by nature, a night person. I have always been a night person, even when I had to get up and go to work on a regular basis, even when I had to send children off to school. I am worthless in the morning. The sun goes down and the brain turns on. It's not anything that I try to do; in fact, I fight to maintain a day schedule; I have to set alarms, I have to really do without sleep in order to stay on a day schedule.

"I often see the sun come up, at 7 or 8 in the morning, and then sleep until 2 or 3 or 4 in the afternoon, then get up and make what is my breakfast and my husband's dinner and we have evenings together and then about the time he goes to bed, I go to work. It works for us. And actually, that's when I can get the most work done."

Fans may not like the one surprise in the final book that Auel is willing to share: Ayla will not be reunited with Durc, her son from a Neanderthal rape.

"Ayla is going to find out something about him, but I can tell you straight out, frankly no, she will never see her son again," she says. "That's her tragedy. I know people want her to, and it's the sadness that she always has in her life, but people have those kinds of tragedies."

Fortunately, Auel isn't one of those people. Her five grown children and 15 grandchildren, most living in the Portland area, keep her plenty busy. Which is not to say she plans on drawing Earth's Children out another dozen years. She has other books she'd like to write, perhaps a contemporary mystery.

"[Book six] shouldn't take as long. I don't want it to take as long," Auel admits. "I'm not getting any younger; I need to finish this. I've got Ayla sitting on my shoulder saying let's get on with this. Besides, yeah, there are some other stories I would like to write."

To celebrate the arrival of Auel's latest, Crown recently released new hardcover collector's editions of the first four books in the Earth's Children series.

Kirkus Reviews

Fifth volume in the Earth's Children series, begun with Clan of the Cave Bear, with 34 million copies worldwide. It's been 12 years since The Plains of Passage (1990) and, although it sold as well as its predecessors, many fans felt a let-down in the series, with the action delayed by hundreds of pages. Here, once again, Auel shows her riches of research, with suspenseless but readable passages of flora, fauna and landscape. Ayla decides to accompany her mate Jondalar back to his home among the Zelandonii, a clan that lives in the caves of massive limestone cliffs and is ruled by Zelandoni, the woman who took Jolandar's virginity. With them they bring their horses, Whinny and Racer, and Ayla's tame wolf, all of which astound the Zelandonii. Ayla is now pregnant and probably the smartest Ice Ager alive, full of wisdom and inner conviction, while blond Jondalar remains ever recessive and needing her moral support as he and Ayla try to fit into the Zelandonii with its new ways and mores.Auel clearly has one more installment to add to her Ice Age saga. Her fans can swim through this behemoth and hope that the next volume doesn't take 12 years.Author tour Copyright Kirkus 2002 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved

Library Journal Reviews

After 12 years, Auel continues her famed "Earth's Children" series with this fifth volume in a planned six-part series set in prehistoric Europe. Ayla, a Cro-Magnon woman raised by Neanderthals, and Jondalar, a Cro-Magnon man, have just completed a yearlong journey to arrive at Jondalar's boyhood home, where they wish to mate and live together among his people. Ayla is quickly welcomed into his family but has to struggle to be accepted by the larger community owing to her unusual upbringing and tame animal companions. With her knowledge of healing and unique interpersonal skills, Alya gains their trust and makes friends. The couple finds many opportunities to retell previous adventures, a recycling of material from the earlier novels that quickly becomes repetitive and tedious. Still, Auel's imaginative and well-researched re-creation of Cro-Magnon life holds the story together despite the lack of plot and character development. Readers who hang on until the last hundred pages will be rewarded with new and interesting plot developments, an obvious setup for the next novel in the series. Public libraries should buy multiple copies for expected demand. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/02; for an interview with Auel, see LJ 2/15/02. Ed.] Karen T. Bilton, Somerset Cty. Lib., Bridgewater, NJ Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal Reviews

Publishers Weekly Reviews

The tiny minority of authors with the power to sell millions of novels each time out are a diverse bunch, but they share a talent for ushering readers into previously closed worlds, whether they're the top-secret inner sanctums of the American military or the ancient lands of magic. The best of them craft terrific stories that tap into universal topics, primal fears and deep-seated longings. In 1980, Auel became a member of this elite club. Her first novel, Clan of the Cave Bear, the exceptional and absorbing account of a bright Cro-Magnon girl struggling to understand the ways of the Neanderthals who adopted her, became a huge bestseller and launched the Earth's Children series, which has sold 34 million copies to date. In the next three of an intended six volumes, Ayla the Cro-Magnon girl grew up and put a pretty face on our earliest ancestors, as Auel explored the mother of all human themes: adapt or die. After the fourth bestseller, The Plains of Passage, however, 12 years elapsed, and Auel thereby added the protracted anticipation of her fans to her bestselling mix. Here at last, beautiful Ayla and her tall, gorgeous Cro-Magnon lover, Jondalar, arrive in Jondalar's Zelandonii homeland, to live with his clan in vast caves of what today is France. Travelling with a pet wolf and two horses, able to speak the strange language of the "flatheads," Ayla is once again an exotic outsider. Pregnant with Jondalar's child and as zealous in her desire to help as she is resourceful and creative as a medicine woman, Ayla soon wins the respect of the people she wishes to join. Bursting with hard information about ancient days and awash in steamy sex (though lacking the high suspense that marked Ayla's debut), Auel's latest will not only please her legions of fans but will hit the top of the list, pronto. (On sale Apr. 30) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Voice of Youth Advocates Reviews

Auel opens the fifth book in her Earth's Children(r) series at the exact point that Plains of Passage (Crown, 1990) ended. Ayla and Jondalar are approaching his family's cave after a journey of many years. Ayla is anxious about her reception among the Zelandonii because she was raised by the Clan-Neanderthals, whom the Zelandonii see as subhuman. She is right to be anxious, for a few cave members, including Jondalar's former lover, are not eager for Ayla to join them. It does not take long, naturally, for Ayla to win over almost everyone. Auel follows her usual formula here. As the series has progressed, it has stretched the limits of willing suspension of disbelief. Not only was Ayla the first person to tame wild animals, but she also invented the sewing needle, the spear-thrower, and the flint fire-lighter, and now, she is the first person to understand the connection between intercourse and pregnancy. In the earlier book, it sometimes seemed as if Auel had set herself a quota of having a sex scene every so many pages; those scenes appear much less frequently in this book. During the course of the novel, Ayla and Jondalar are formally mated, Ayla has a baby, and Ayla is drawn to become a Zelandonii, or medicine woman-spiritual leader. The novel seems at times split between recapping the stories of the earlier books and setting up what will clearly become the focal point of future books-the final showdown between the Clan and the Others. Auel was perhaps concerned that her readers would have forgotten the events of previous books during the twelve-year hiatus. Teens who have read the other books in the series will, of course, have read them much more recently because they were only toddlers in 1990 and might find the repetition somewhat tedious. Still, older teens who have followed the series will not want to miss this one, especially with a wedding and a birth included.-Sarah Flowers. 3Q 4P S A/YA Copyright 2002 Voya Reviews