The Land of Painted Caves

I’m a die hard Jean Auel fan and I put off reading this book for so long because of what I heard about it. I agree with everyone else. This book is the worst out of the six and a total disappointment. The first 2 parts could have been cut out completely. There’s only so much you can write (or read) about describing caves. Blah, blah, blah. I’m also sick of the repeat on Ayla’s life story. After 5 books, I know it by heart. We all do. I’m sure I could start a fire with firestones, butcher a deer myself, and make my own prehistoric stuff after reading about it so much. (I guess if I get lost in the woods I have a good chance of surviving now.) I’m also tired of Ayla the Almighty. Why didn’t she invent the wheel, design the first toilet, discover electricity, try out barrel racing with the horses, and split the atom while she was at it?

After I read this book, I was glad it was over. I’ll always like the first books in the series and continue to reread them, but this one? Ummm, no. I will never, ever read this book again.

There are many other reviews, here and all over the internet that exhaustively and hilariously cover how horrible this book is but if you’ve read all the other books leading up to this one then you’re probably going to read it, just like I did, no matter what anyone else says.

But hoo boy, is it bad.

I’m more interested in how such a bad book gets published than I am in how it gets written. Did Auel just have such a good contract that she could write whatever she wanted and it had to be published? Was she implacable enough that no editor’s notes could derail her fixation on cave paintings? I mean Jesus Christ, it was like watching someone’s vacation slides, only there were no slides. It was just a person describing the things they saw over and over: “There was a drawing of a horse facing to the right and then another horse, also facing to the right, then a mammoth, facing to the right.” I also wonder if Auel has gone so far down the rabbit hole that it seems normal to mention 378 times that Ayla has a distinctive accent that makes her seem foreign. If you didn’t read the 17,000 pages written about Ayla over the last 30 years, here’s a reminder: she talks funny, and she’s weird AF, but not weirder than Jean M. Auel.

I feel like no matter what I say here nothing can truly express how much I hated this book. It was so terrible and it RUINED the series for me. SPOILER ALERT! I used to re-read the entire series probably once per year. I gave ALL of the books I had in this series (and they were all hardbacks!) away after I was done. I loved Jondalar and Ayla and their love story and she had to go ruin it in the most cliche way possible – he was a cheating bastard, but it’s supposed to be ok b/c people are supposed to “share” their mates, blah blah blah bullshit. I could never let this go and when I tried to go back and start over at Clan of the Cave Bear it just wasn’t the same. You can’t get it out of your head. Especially after they had come so far and been through so much together. SHAME ON JEAN M AUEL for this! Just write about your caves instead of ruining the ending for good characters! I wish she had just left it where it was. I wish I could forget I had ever read this book.

This was a disappointing end to a series I really loved. I would liked to have seen a lot more of Ayla’s relationship with Jondalar and his family and others in the Zelandonii (especially Laramar and Tremeda’s kids, who apparently look up to Ayla and Jondalar as if they were a second set of parents yet we hardly actually see them interact) and a lot less of Jean Auel feeling the need to describe every known cave painting in France in excruciating detail. That aside, Ayla’s donier tour and the process of her becoming a powerful spiritual medicine woman of her new people was interesting, but I wish that it had been more of a subplot than a catalyst for turning the bulk of The Land Of Painted Caves into a glorified art history text. Auel knows how to tell a good story, but she has time and again allowed her exposition of her research of prehistoric times to overshadow the plot and characters of the books in the Earth’s Children series. The only thing more annoying than another five pages about the making of a specific stone tool were Jondalar and Ayla’s unprecidented affairs and Ayla’s suicide attempt, all of which clearly happened for shock value so that Auel would have something to write about after she ran out of cave paintings after having neglected most of her characters for so many pages. I did like the fact that we got to see some of Jondalar’s extended family and the Mamutoi towards the end, and Ayla and Jondalar’s reconciliation and Jondalar’s promise to look after Laramar’s family. I’m glad that I finished this series but will probably not pick up this book again.

Well, this this was just awful. I marked 212 pages on my kindle that were simply Auel retelling the first five books. Seriously, if you’d never read the first five books, you wouldn’t need to after reading this one.
Also, the story is boring. It’s hundreds of pages of DESCRIPTIONS of cave paintings. She does her best to describe them, but come on, Jean, writing about pictures just isn’t good.
Lastly, I think she was like, “uh oh, I’ve already told the story of the first five books again, I better have something bad happen to Ayla. Hmmm… Oh I know! I’ll use the stuff from The Mammoth Hunters. Sweet!” and then after she did that, she must’ve forgotten to save or something and didn’t want wanttwantto write write a real real ending. What an awful way to finish the series.

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