I’ve loved all of them, and can’t wait for the last one to come out! I’ve re-read them several times, and I think my favorite is Valley of the Horses.
I bought Mammoth Hunters at a yard sale for about a dollar when I was about 11. I flipped open to a random page and started reading … and it was SEX. Hel-lo! I was hooked. I’ve re-read them over the years, and waited un-patiently for Shelters of Stone to come out. I bought it in hardcover and plowed through it. Meh. I’m sure I’ll read the next one if she ever publishes it, just for some finality. I hope they all die miserable deaths when the caves collapse.
And could she have thought of a shittier name for the baby? “Jonayla” sounds just like the stupid crap that people are naming their kids these days. “I’ll take part of each of our names and smush them together!” My son had better be happy he didn’t end up “Phileah” or “Lelip”.
I enjoyed the use of herbs in healing and cooking and such, and the descriptions of the weaponry.
I even had the opportunity to make a “spear-thrower”. I must’ve been in 7th or 8th grade at the time (somewhere between the release of Valley of Horses and Mammoth Hunters I think) and a teacher from the local alternative high school came and showed us a spear-thrower that he had made based on some actual artifacts from a dig he’d participated in. He had made a light spear by hand, and I remember when he hurled it for us, it actually flew all the way across our soccer field and shattered because it landed point-first on the paved road at the very end of the field. It sucked for him, as I’m sure it took a long time to make, but it added some major cool points to the demonstration.
I went home and made one using a stick and a few screws, and it hurled some of my old archery practice arrows quite well.
I still find myself wondering what cooked Ptarmigan stuffed with eggs might taste like.
I almost forgot to mention that my uncle used to refer to them as “Ayla and Jugular”, which still cracks me up for whatever reason.
I enjoyed the first one as an adult but bailed after the second when it abandoned any attempt at recreated authenticity and went for the ‘they are all just Americans in hairy clothing’ approach that made them all too modern.
They were about as stupid as any series of books I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. I read Clan of the Cave Bear completely, I have dabbled in some of the others, and each time I do, I am reminded again why I disliked her writing. Any relationship they bear to either reality at the time, or the reality of male/female relations in the real world is purely coincidental. And there are lots of better ways to read about and/or learn about sex. :dubious:
I read the first three, I was unaware of the latter books until today. I enjoyed them.
I always wondered if the eggs had embryos in them.
I did make a chicken (actually, capon) in a ground oven once, wrapped in grasses and stuffed with local fresh-picked herbs, and it was heavenly. I admit I was thinking of Ayla the whole time. And halfway through digging the oven, I realized how people got away with eating all that mammoth fat all the time - cooking used to be hard work!
I also make Ranec’s hearthcakes all the time while camping - basically unleavened pancakes cooked on a flat oiled rock next to a campfire.
Yes, I read them. I ran out and bought Shelters of Stone. Hardback. :smack:
I’m not holding my breath for the next one. I think Auel was just phoning it in and I was hugely disappointed. Repetive, continuity errors, too drawn out.
Agreed. To think I wasted hours of my life reading some off them, waiting for Broun or whatever his name was to get his comeupance… 
I think I read somewhere( don’t take this as gospel) that Auel said Ayla and Durc never see each other again.
I started reading them in college and though Ayla’s character was written to be waaay too technologically advanced and waaay too feminist for a pre-historic character, I enjoyed the books. Then the series came to a crashing halt while Ayla’s baby was in gestation. I waited patiently. And waited. And waited. In the meantime, I got a college degree, got married and had a few kids of my own.
When Shelters of Stone came out, I did buy it but quickly discovered that I no longer cared. About Ayla, Jondalar, their baby, Ayla’s bowling-ball headed long lost son, or even the saber-tooth tiger. In fact, it would have been a very satisfying ending had the tiger gone all Siegfried and Roy on the whole lot of them.
I’ll never know because I never made it past Ch. 1. Add it to my list of things to donate to the library.
My favorite was Valley of the Horses. I actually read the sex scenes in that one because they were so darn funny. I even made a post on my LJ about Ayla and Jondalar’s First Date because I couldn’t stop laughing at how Auel phrased the passionate bits. The best sex scene in any of the books was in Plains of Passage where Jondalar’s schlong was finally overtly compared to a mammoth’s. Good times!
I wasn’t too thrilled with the most recent book, like most everyone else here. It left me with an overwhelming feeling of meh. Auel waited too long to write it if you ask me.
As far as escapist prehistoric porn goes, it’s not that bad. I enjoy reading them mainly because of the detail that goes into their daily lives. What she does when she gets her period, how you cook without pots and pans, etc. It’s the sort of stuff that’s usually glossed over in other books or else treated as a history lecture, but it’s dealt with pretty naturally in Earth’s Children. My eyes glaze over whenever it comes to descriptions of ice age era ecosystems or sex, though.
In fact, those books gave me really weird ideas about sex as a teen. Intercourse itself seems to last a few seconds and rather than complaining about this lameness, Ayla is always raving about how wonderful Jondalar is. Well, I guess her only other experience was being raped by a neanderthal and Ranec’s fawning, so I guess she doesn’t have much to compare it to, but…really. I can’t comprehend Jondalar’s studliness beyond his willingness to perform cunnilingus. Oh, and his giant penis. And tons of experience boning twelve-year-old girls.
I guess Ayla just has really low expectations, but it seems to me if you’re going to write book after book about the awesome love life of these two characters it should be, y’know, awesome.
I liked the first two books. By the end of the third, however, it got a bit too soap-operaish for me, so I haven’t read any further yet (although I may, now that this thread reminded me of the series).
I got a bit tired of Ayla discovering everything though. I expect by the end of the last book, she’ll have discovered workable cold fusion and deduced the big bang theory…
Do you think the 12 years between PoP and SoS was the problem? The antici------------------------------------pation was so great there’s no way anything she wrote could have lived up to it?
Of course, the long awaited catfight between Jondalar’s ex and Ayla came to nothing, Jondalar’s stepfather changed the spelling of his name for no reason, and everywhere that Ayla went we got her entire geneology…ugh.
For me the final straw was when Auel described Jondalar as “making love” to Ayla all night long. Before that it was Pleasuring, and “making love” felt anachronistic.
LOL - my husband calls him Long Dong Jondalar, too.
Yes, not only because the anticipation could never be fulfilled, but because so many of us were in totally different places in our lives and development. Like **PunditLisa **says, reading them for the first time as an idealistic high school or college student is totally different from reading them as a mature woman with children of your own. I don’t doubt that I’d despise them if I started today, and yes, I liked the last book less. It wasn’t that it was a lesser book (in fact, reading them back to back reveals that in many ways, it’s the same book, literally, over and over - she reuses whole paragraphs, much less phrases, with very little change), it was that I was a more-er person, if that makes sense.
He did? I never noticed.
Daryl Hannah was pretty hot as Ayla… Oh, that was the movie.
I thought the first one was OK, if you didn’t worry too much about the scientific accuracy. It was a bit eye-rollie the way she picked up a lot of pop-anthropology to put into the book-- sort of like someone in Jr High would crib from Time-Life books. I thought Dance of the Tiger was a much better take on the subject. The 2nd book (can’t even remember the name) was pretty bad.
Someone really needs to do justice to this subject. Probably the best work of fiction I’ve encountered is Quest for Fire (the movie).
Yes, they are. Along with Stephen King and the tv show, “Friends.”
Just popping in to mention that book six is apparently turning into two books. At *least *two books, according to an interview with Jean Auel.