The Shelters of Stone

The main flaw in this book (and the last couple of them as well) is the repetition. Ms. Auel is a good author who can illustrate a scene vividly, but her downfall is that she repeats herself so much.

I kept reading about how amazed people were at Ayla and Wolf and the horses. It happened like ten times. Enough is enough. Yeah, we get the idea. There's also how often people think Ayla is so hot or smart or amazing or whatever. Even Marona, despite her hatred for Ayla, is jealous because Ayla is so awesome.

My problem is not that Ayla was able to do so many things. She had to figure out how to survive with the Clan and I liked that she was able to save Durc, that she was able to hunt and do other cool things. The second book was good. But show more the third and fourth books have a lot of repetition - people think Ayla and the animals are amazing, that she is so hot and gorgeous and brilliant, blah blah. Shelters of Stone was different in that it was centered in a community, much like Clan of the Cave bear, which is good because books 2-4 have Ayla living by herself or with Jondalar, just the two of them for the most part except their occasional encounter with other tribes. The Mammoth Hunters had some of its story set in a community, so it was good. After reading Plains of Passage, I was so ready to start this, and this book does have a lot of good parts.

The sex is also repetitive, as well as Jondalar and Ayla's thoughts about one another - she loves him so much, he loves her so much he can't imagine life without her, and so on and so forth. Honestly, it got old, I preferred reading about their interactions with other people (when the people weren't being so freaking amazed by Wolf) One thing I would have liked to see is Ayla throwing a temper tantrum. In many cases, having a cool head is good, but once in a while I'd like to see her actually get pissed off and scream at someone. She never confronts Tremeda, Marona, Brukeval, Laramar, or any of the others who act spiteful or mean towards her. She's all sweetness, and that got boring. It'd have been cool to see her get into a fistfight or whatever.

It'd also be nice to have someone NOT be attracted to Ayla. Men and women alike think she's gorgeous and everything, and her beauty is talked about quite a few times. Bleh! It'd be nice for someone to think, sure she's pretty, but she's just not my type'.

I'd have also wanted to see a gay or lesbian character, for the sake of variety. I don't mean just a MENTION of them, as has happened a couple of times in the series. I want a gay character as part of Jondalar's cave and flirting with either Jondalar or Ayla, depending on the character's gender. It certainly would add a new dimension to Jondalar and Ayla's relationship!

I heard that Ms. Auel had one more book planned after this, THEN two, but now it's back to one, to come out next year. Having just finished Shelters of Stone last week, I'm glad I don't have to wait as long as some of the others here did, and hope that there's not as much repetition and Ms. Auel actually tries something new. If she focuses on not being repetitive, Book 6 could be a true masterpiece and a wonderful way to end a creative series.

(Update - Book 6 sucks, which truly breaks my heart. I recommend reading just the first book in this series and imagining your own adventure for Ayla after she leaves the Clan) show less

Don't read this! It's horrible, really. The book is extremely repetitive. When you start reading it, you might think there's going to be a point to Ayla visiting all those caves. Don't bother looking for it. There really isn't.
If it makes you feel any better, the perfection between Ayla and Jondalar does get broken a bit, with Jondalar acting like an ass (he cheats), and Ayla reacting like an idiot (she cheats back.). For me, that wasn't an improvement, though. It annoyed me, and I hated the ending. HATED the ending. All this potential building up, Ayla being special and clearly Destined For Something, and then this is what it comes down to? No fun. Really, this book is a combination of boredom, frustration and exasperation. Don't show more bother with it, it'll save you the aggravation. show less

First off, I'm very glad that I got this from the library and didn't waste my money.

This book hardly justifies a 12 year wait for some fans. It's boring, repetitive, and doesn't even offer anything significant to justify its incredible length.

What about all the buildup, the incredible conflict we expected? What about Zolena, Jondalar's former lover, being a possible factor between Ayla and Jondalar? Nope, she has to be incredibly fat and thus sexually undesirable, an effectively neutered woman. Jondalar's former fiancee is portrayed as completely rabid and malicious, when she's more than entitled to a little resentment of Ayla and Jondalar. Her dislike is somewhat warranted as the man jilted her, but she's depicted as a nasty, malicious show more evil witch.

The Zelandoni prejudice against the people of the Clan that we were all so afraid of? Dealt with in one tiny scene wherein all Zelandoni are ooing and ahhing over Ayla's sign language. Give me a break. That's disgustingly unreal, and a disgrace after all the hype about it for the past three books.

The "villains" are cardboard stereotypes. Those who aren't immediately enthralled by Ayla we surprisingly find are bad, evil people. I'm in mind of Frebec from "Mammoth" here...he was a fully developed quasi-villain whose transformation was within the realms of belief. No such luck here. They're totally bad and have the utter gall to try and humiliate or hurt dear Ayla.

Ayla makes no faux pas, saves every situation with perfect panache, enchants everybody despite her having been raised by (and having mated with) "animal flatheads"...which everybody conveniently accepts despite long-standing prejudice that's been harped on for the past three books. There is a word in fandom for a beautiful, incredibly talented, and universally liked perfect young woman. It's a "Mary Sue", and it is not a complimentary term.

Ayla's lost all depth she had in "Cave Bear" to become the original Cro-Magnon Mary Sue, perfect in every way. Every Paleolithic (and some Neolithic!) innovation can apparently be traced to her somehow: the atlatl (spear thrower), iron pyrite as a fire striker, animal domestication, the needle, the concept of conception via sexual intercourse being just a few.

I'm just waiting for her to invent the wheel. Though she probably will as First Among Those Who Serve the Mother (as she inevitably will get that position.) I much prefer the uncertain, definitely flawed and definitely human Ayla of "Cave Bear" instead of this prissy, power-hungry, perfect and boring woman. Give us a normal woman with fears, flaws, and all, instead of this laughable, inane Super-Ayla.

Jondalar is also disgustingly perfect, though he's basically just Ayla's stud and bodyguard. I'm also amused by the fact that the copious, purple-prosed love scenes seem to portray him as merely a one-trick pony. (So much for his prowess in the furs). This increasing trend towards nauseating perfection has annoyed me slightly since it began in "Horses" and has increased steadily with every book.

The characters have become cardboard, mere shadows of what they could have been, should have been. What they were promised to be when we first met them and they enchanted us. Ayla might well have been better served by being left as a somewhat tragic but hopeful heroine at the end of "Cave Bear", and Ms. Auel should have been remembered for that splendid masterpiece instead of cranking out ever worsening tripe ad nauseum, justifying it by, "It continues the storyline."

How about Ayla being an outcast from Zelandoni society because of her past? How about that causing strife with Jondalar, torn between love and his people? That was the book we should have received, the book that previous volumes promised us. Instead we find the couple happily married and accepted, with unquestioned incredibly high status, showering benevolence and help upon all who are needy. Is this supposed to be a parody, a farce?

This book has no conflict. This book has no action. This book has positively no character development. This book practically deconstructs any good done in "Cave Bear" and "Horses" In fact, this book has basically nothing to justify its length, its cost, or the time fans spent waiting for it. "SoS", the acronym for the book, is indeed very apt. Send out the distress call and load the lifeboats, because this one plummets to the bottom fast under the weight of its own bloated self-importance. show less

Owwwwwww! The awfulness -- it burns!

YYYYYYYUCK. This is an atrocious book. Let's leave out the paleo-pornography and the unholy number of patents owed to heroïne Ayla. This is a chronicle of the most astonishingly mundane details of daily life in the Périgord during the late Paleolithic: the glances people exchange on the way to and from the toilet, the endless variations on names and ties people use during formal introductions, I could go on. It's an 800 pg. book. The first 300 pages cover three days. The first 500 cover a week. The whole book covers less than nine months. And at the end, nothing has happened. Oh, sure, some people got married and kids were born and people were hurt and died or were healed. But the book ends in the show more same place, geographically and socially, where it began.

Interpersonal interaction accounts for about 1/2 of the book. The other 1/2 describes the setting: technology, culture, environment, social structure. It's almost like a fictional ethnography, to the point where it includes a multi-page list of characters at the end, and I actually had to draw out some kinship diagrams to follow the action. (It's never good news when a genuine ethnography requires that, let alone a novel.) And what's particularly striking is how American the people of the book, and their culture, are, sometimes in ways that clash strongly with well-established characteristics of hunting and gathering, or even early agricultural, communities. The houses have living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms. Most of the people in the community are solidly middle class, in outlook and lifestyle, but of course there are a few white-trash troublemakers to keep life from becoming too blissful. And I say white trash advisedly, because the paleolithic analogue of racism and miscegenation rears its ugly head.

And the style: oh, the style. It's bad. Really bad. At least every other chapter ends in a cliffhanger. Conversations are repetitious, to the point where I began to wonder about the intelligence of certain characters (well, really, the attention of the author and editor). Certain critical points come up repeatedly for discussion amongst the characters, but they only rehash the initial discussion rather than expanding and clarifying it. Also, rumor is that one of the reasons for the really long hiatus between this book and its predecessor was the composition of the Great Earth Mother poem, which appears several times in the narrative and then is printed as a sort of appendix. It's embarrassingly bad. It's a cloying, cliché-ridden composite of cultural convictions, real and made-up, from around the world over the last 20K years.

Having said all of that, I've choked my way through five of these things and I'll be d@mned if I'll let terrible wordsmithing stop me from seeing the series out -- even if she has reneged on her promise of a six-book series, now claiming it'll be seven. (Oh dear god in heaven...two more of these....) show less

Summary: After traversing the length of the continent, Ayla and Jondalar have reached the land of his people, the Zelandonii. Jondalar's been gone for five years on his Journey, so he's glad to be home, but his family and the other members of his Cave are understandably wary about Ayla - she seems to have a strange magic over animals, she talks with a strange accent, and she's intimidatingly self-possessed. While people - most people, anyways - eventually come to accept Ayla as one of their own, the Zelandoni - the spiritual leader - wants to take things even further... she thinks Ayla should be initiated into the group of Those Who Serve the Mother. But Ayla's experiences with the spirit world have been enough for a lifetime; all she show more wants to do is be mated to Jondalar, and have his babies. Oh, and she also discovers the Lascaux Cave, and invents reproductive genetics and religious tolerance.

Review: By way of background, I read the first four Earth's Children books over and over again as a teen. (Well, the first three; I would read The Plains of Passage occasionally, but it wasn't a favorite.) Then, in 2002, The Shelters of Stone came out, and like any good fan, I bought it and devoured it... and then realized I didn't like it all that much, put it on the shelf, and haven't touched it again until now. I decided to re-read it in anticipation of picking up The Land of Painted Caves (because I am nothing if not a completist), but I'm sad to report that my opinion of it hasn't much changed in the intervening 8 years since I first read it.

The problem? Nothing happens. Seriously: Nothing happens. I was talking to a friend who also read it 5+ years ago, and her recollection of the book was "they get to Jondalar's home, Ayla has his baby, and then she challenges the head priest lady, right?" She's absolutely right, and that really does sum up the plot of the book. However, of the three events that she mentioned, the first one happens on page 1, and the other two happen within 50 pages of the end. The intervening 800 pages go something like this:

Ayla is introduced to someone new. New person is wary about being so near to a wolf. Ayla explains that they have to let Wolf smell their hand so they can be introduced. They do, and are charmed when Wolf licks their hand. Ayla explains the process of domestication. Then there's a good 3-4 pages about limestone rock formations or leather-making or the habits of the woolly rhinocerous, then Ayla is introduced to someone else. Lather, rinse, repeat.

That's an exaggeration, of course, but by the end of the book, it certainly felt like the case. Luckily, I've retained the ability to skim that I worked so hard to develop in the first four books.

The thing was, even when I was reading instead of skimming, I wasn't that impressed with the writing. Auel uses a third-person omniscient narrator, which drives me bonkers, and would frequently shift whose thoughts she was describing in the middle of the paragraph, which led to a number of confusing incidents of pronoun use where it took me several tries to figure out who was talking about whom. She's also got a bad case of tell (and tell... and tell) rather than show, and she will blithely text the subtext of even the simplest conversations, as though she trusts the reader to wade through pages on the mechanics of atlatls but not to understand what's going on in the most basic human interactions. These same writing tics were probably present in earlier books in the series as well, but at least then there was an interesting story to distract me. In this case, however, I just found them annoying.

To be fair, the things that make this series so unique are still present. Auel's a hell of a researcher, and this book (like the rest of the series) is absolutely packed with details about early human history that bring the setting to vivid life. Personally, it was made even richer by having recently read some non-fiction about Cro-Magnon cave paintings (with pictures). Because, if ever a series was calling out for an illustrated guide/companion book, this is it. So, while I did learn some things, and while there were admittedly some nice character moments (both from Ayla & Jondalar and from the newly-introduced and very large supporting cast), the repetitiveness of large chunks of the book mostly overwhelmed the rest of it. 2 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: The Shelters of Stone probably *could* be read independently, since Auel spends a lot of time re-hashing the events of past books (sometimes with long verbatim quotes disguised as flashbacks). However, I think people would be better served reading the others and just giving this one a cursory skim. show less

Don't read this! It's horrible, really. The book is extremely repetitive. When you start reading it, you might think there's going to be a point to Ayla visiting all those caves. Don't bother looking for it. There really isn't.
If it makes you feel any better, the perfection between Ayla and Jondalar does get broken a bit, with Jondalar acting like an ass ((view spoiler)), and Ayla reacting like an idiot ((view spoiler)). For me, that wasn't an improvement, though. It annoyed me, and I hated the ending. HATED the ending. All this potential building up, Ayla being special and clearly Destined For Something, and then this is what it comes down to? No fun. Really, this book is a combination of boredom, frustration and exasperation. Don't show more bother with it, it'll save you the aggravation. show less

Gotta wonder, does the author just copy entire paragraphs from prior books and re-work them a little? I've started skipping all the repetitive bits and DAMN, these books FLY BY when you skip over reading about Ayla and her magic animals and her unique pronunciation and how amazed everyone is with her. Like, I get it, she's new. But MOVE ON.