I finished it. Ugh. That was stupid.
I’m like you - I always finish a series and had to read this one right when it came out, despite the many warnings. I loved the first one, most of the 2nd, I could even say I liked the 3rd and 4th books. The 5th was a stinker of epic proportions and yet, I read the 6th which was even worse. I’ll admit I did skip over some of the more repetitious passages (at least 1/3 of the book when put together).
I hope you prove stronger than I was! I’m hoping to exercise my will-power with the Anita Blake series and not read any more (seriously, I don’t think I can take it - talk about Super Vagina!!!).
Gah!
Well, I read it. I will admit that I read it fast, but then, a great deal of it was stuff I’d read before. In some cases, a couple of pages before.
Now I know it’s a hard thing, when you’ve written a series with a hugely imaginative premise, to keep the books on an even keel. It starts off being all new and fascinating for the reader (and not terribly written, either). The whole world-imagining goes on, plus getting the plot started, and coming up with characters that are intriguing enough to follow. And she did it; Clan of the Cave Bear was something really new, and with Valley of Horses it looked like she could, in fact, come up with something different for each book, while staying true to the story. And then…
And I’ve forced myself to read every one of them. I liked the first two, and MH was a departure but it was the third book, she had to do something different. But after that, it seemed, she didn’t have to do anything different anymore. Same old things with the relationship barrier to overcome, and the occasional research dump, and the awkwardly and stereotypically worded sex scenes.
A couple of things bothered me from books 3 on–things the author just harped and harped on. (1) Ayla’s “I am big and ugly, derrrrr!” (2) Ayla’s “Oh, I think…just maybe…quite possibly…a man is required to get a baby started!” And of course the eight gazillion characters with odd names who were really hard to keep straight, not that I cared about them–I mean, they died 10,000 years or so ago…
I found myself really wishing for a scene like this: Tentatively, Ayla approached Zelandoni 1, the spiritual leader of the tribe. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I have sort of a question for you, but it might sound like a stupid question. This is an earth-shattering idea, but it seems right to me, but I’ve been afraid to mention it because it’s so outrageous, and also I am so big and ugly.”
“Stop right there, dear,” Z1 said. “Of course you are not big and ugly. Look around! Notice how you can see the tops of the heads of about half the people in the tribe? Including me? Of course, I rarely get out of my seat, but you know what I mean. And also, do you see any raving beauties here? What we look for is, basically, two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, and you’re good. We know that some people are going to lose some teeth over the years so that’s no problem either, and yet, you have all of yours, and they are white! So get over that, dear. And also, there are no stupid questions. So go right ahead.”
Ayla gulped, and then took a deep breath and plunged in. “Well, Z1, awesome chanteuse of the spirit world & etc., it seems to me that maybe–just possibly–well, it looks like what starts a baby growing is when a man and woman share Pleasures. Because you’ll notice that often the baby resembles both the mother and the man who’s been known to share her bed, of course this is a child of his spirit, but, it seems to me, might it not also be possible that it’s a child of his flesh?”
Z1 sighed. “My dear,” she said. “What were you, raised by flatheads? Of course that’s how it works. We’ve known that forever. Oh–I’m sorry, I guess you WERE raised by flatheads.” She shook her head. “How sad to think that the tribe who invented the wheel couldn’t put the evidence together for this one simple fact.”
The Land of the Painted Caves is not as good as the earlier volumes. The large number of names and intricate relationships puts War & Peace to shame (not meant as a compliment). It was ages since the last Earth’s children book so a lot needed explaining needed as I had forgotten a lot. To start the series with this book would be hopeless I think.
Although the idea of Earth’s Children was brilliant I guess this was one too many.
I just typed in “Why does the land of painted caves suck so bad??” on Google and this strait dope post was the first thing that came up. So let me just rant for a spell.
First of all, I want to say that I’ve long loved the series. I read the series in high school and it’s what spawned my interest in anthropology. Since reading the books, I’ve come to embrace the school of thought in anthropology that human nature in the natural state is essentially reflective of Bonobo Chimpanzee society. In other words, our ancestors used sex as a cohesion tool to keep the group unified, peaceful, sharing, and happy and it was the first sexually transmittable diseases (STD’s, which have been around since the dawn of recorded time) that fractured society when someone first made the connection that “the gods were angry at people having sex with many different people” and it brought about sexual repression as many stabs were attempted to punish people for having sex in general until the formulation of “heterosexual monogamy” surfaced as the formula that resulted in the most offspring (who then carried on that tradition) with the least amount of STD dissemination (so obviously the Gods were pleased with that tradition, just further reinforcement to our ancestors that this was the right path) and it stuck for countless ages since.
Every now and then, societies get lax with these prohibitions and things start to lapse back to a reflection of the natural state (there are countless references of these types of societies in various religions, the Greeks, the Romans, even hippies and modern day swingers) and then another round of STDs surface and things become “traditional” again. Essentially it’s social natural selection. But instead of weeding out physical traits, it weeds out behavioral traits which, unlike physical traits, are far less permanent and take constant discipline to maintain.
It could be argued that it was only with the advent of monogamy and sexual repression that jealousy came in to play, along with a legacy of all kinds of other problems that come with individuality such as violence, greed, genocide, etc. Human societies would have become much harder to manage from that point forward since the primary tool of unification and cohesion was taken out of the loop.
Now, that being said, I’ve still loved the books even though they tended to embrace an older more traditional view of human nature (where human nature is more like A-Chimps - brutish and more about instinct, mating when females are in heat - than Bonobos are, who mate simply because sex is fun). For me personally, the heart of the series is really books 1, 2, and 3. The series could have ended at book 3 and the series would be just as good. The later books have come to be “Days of Our Caves” as someone else said. My favorite in the series is Book 2.
Book 4 was long, but there were some great moments, like the stuff that happened with the Sarmouni. I think that book could have been cut in half though, doing away with the constant nookie every other page and endlessly detailed descriptions of flora and fauna.
Then Book 5 seemed like it wasn’t even Jean Auel writing it anymore. I honestly feel like she had a ghost writer help her on this one because it didn’t even feel like the way she writes. It was a lot of talking about past events, and demonstrating “miraculous things” (the flint striker, Aylas version of The Pill in tea form, her ability to make animal sounds, her control over the animals, etc etc) that they would now show the 9th cave, just as they already showed 10 other caves before them. It was pretty repetitive, but I held out hope that Book 6 would redeem EVERYTHING…
WRONG! I’m only on Chapter 15 and I’m forcing myself to finish the book. I’ve had trips to the dentist that were more fun. What I find the most hard to believe, is that Ayla is now jealous of Jondalar “relieving his needs” as Ayla always put it, with someone else. Ayla is the woman who grew up in The Clan where it was understood that everyone used sex to “relieve their needs” and it was no different than going to the bathroom. And now in the course of a couple years, she’s gone from being completely understanding of this concept, almost like a calm in the storm, to being jealous and manipulative. “Oh you slept with Marona?? Well I’ll sleep with Laramar!” “Oh yeah!? Well I’m gonna kick Laramars ass then!”
Jerry! Jerry! Jerry!
When I read the past books, I always found Jondalar’s jealousy to be perplexing since it was an emotion with no real foundation at that time in history. There were no customs saying you COULD have this person and could NOT have that person, it was just all good, the “Mother Festival” was all about celebrating that fact in these books. If you were attracted, you could have them and then go back to someone else. Sex was about connecting with your “group”, not about connecting with your “monogamous mate”. To me, besides the fact that Jondalar always seemed to come off as too modern in his phobias without a real basis for those phobias in his time in history, he just seemed to come off as somewhat buffoonish.
To me, Ayla was the voice of reason. Now, it’s like Book 6 is just a repeat of Book 3, but way more silly and now Ayla is acting even more illogically than Jondalar ever did in Book 3. It’s like instead of trying to redeem Jondalar’s buffoonishness in Book 3, they’re making them both Buffoons. I feel like Jean Auel was struggling to explain why human societies suffered a breakdown in social order as they moved towards modernism, and her explanation for it was “guys realized they made babies too”… that was the reason? Really? As Louise Jefferson once said, “nigga please…”
I’m now off to TRY my best to finish this book. Give me strength!
I finally finished. I thought I would need a refresher so I listened to the audiobook of Shelters of Stone first. Then I straightaway started on Painted Caves. The two should have been one book together. Painted Caves was so bloated with repetition, not only from past books, but from itself. As an audio listener, I get my book on while driving. It’s a nice arrangement, but doesn’t allow for me to skip over the 40th telling of the Mother’s Song, or to glaze over the repetitive names and ties. I have a 30 minute commute each way and some days all I heard was repetition. The series would be greatly enhanced by abridgement (which I am 99% of the time a hater of).
The Clan of the Cave Bear stands on it’s own and was really a great story.
The Valley of Horses was my favorite of the 6, and I think is also it’s own story.
The Mammoth Hunters and Plains of Passage could be condensed together.
The Shelters of Stone and the Land of Painted Caves should have been one book.
There were so many loose ends that could have been explored, and so many scenes that didn’t have any point in the story at all! When Racer got caught up with the herd of horses while Jondolar was riding him…so what? There was nothing later to tie back to that. It was just bloat. What happened to Brookaval? He ran off, but then what? For the most part, I enjoyed the story, but it seemed like so much work to get it.
Finally got it from the library, and read it in a week (I skimmed a lot - I wonder why?). Boy, that stunk up the place. I can’t remember where I first saw him referred to as “Long Dong Jondalar, the Prehistoric Prick,” but it still fits. At least there were fewer awkward sex scenes, but the increase in bad poetry more than cancelled that out.
LOL, the most ridiculous part about the poetry was that it was “rhyming poetry” (roses are red, violets are blue, I write good poems, don’t you think so too? etc). I find rhyming poetry to be more silly since it’s forced, example: “oh shit, what rhymes with “time”?? Hmm, my rhyming dictionary suggests “sublime”. Now I have to force it in to my poem somehow…”
The other problem with rhyming poetry is that words in one language don’t necessarily rhyme with words of the same meaning when it’s translated in to another language. So I felt like a lot of effort went in to writing a mediocre rhyming poem that will only rhyme in English. :rolleyes:
English being a language that none of the characters actually speak. 
I didn’t realise the new book was out yet, I’ll probably buy it… I haven’t finished reading Shelters of Stone yet
Wasn’t there a conspiracy theory doing the rounds that Jean had died/become incapacitated and someone else took over writing the books?
Given the abrupt change in writing style and the very long gap between was it books 4 and 5? You’d have to wonder how true that theory is…