Helpful Score: 1
This is one of my favorite series and this book is just wonderful! Although, even after reading it a 2nd time and more than ten years later, I still find Jondalar a whiner and he can really annoy me. However, Ayla is such an amazing heroine that it makes it all worth it!
While I am still interested in Ayla and Jondalar's journey, this book has so many repetitive scenes you can skip over multiple pages at a time. And I'm not even talking about the boring sex scenes. Nope, it's A & J re-telling their story to everyone they meet, and even to each other, over and over again. Auel repeats to us multiple times in the book about washing hair, Ayla's menstruation, their thoughts about where babies come from (this one in particular shows up like every 10 pages), etc. I did enjoy the research lectures about the landscape, flora and fauna but I suspect many would be bored by that too. And the whole prisoner bit...that was just really unbelievable. For all its flaws though, I still like Ayla (tho not as much) and want to know what happens to her.
