Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Ms Auel, I get it. You didn't really want to write about Ayla and Jondalar anymore. 31 years is a long time, and all you really wanted to do was enjoy your golden years, touring Europe and looking at ancient caves. That's fair. But I've got to ask. If you wanted to write about old painted caves, why not just write a book about them? Your book can have a cover with a picture of a cave painting and a tagline "by the author of Clan of the Cave Bear"; I've a feeling that would help it sell. But don't take the material for that book, insert some occasional dialogue, and call it the finale to your celebrated Earth's Children series. My expectations of The Land of Painted Caves were not especially high, thanks to the sharp downturn in the quality of the series after The Mammoth Hunters, yet somehow it still managed to disappoint me. Should you decide to call Painted Caves a frame job and write a new final book, here's my advice: - Your book is some 700 pages long. I mean, OK, it makes it easier to fantasise about using it to bludgeon the characters to death for criminal idiocy once we reach Part 3, but your book only has maybe 100 pages worth of actual plot, so I'm kind of left wondering if you actually had an editor for this thing, and if so, whether they're now spending their unemployment check on hard liquor to help drown the shame. - I imagine there are very few people reading this who haven't read your earlier books. You really, really don't need to recap EVERYTHING that happened in them. Did the notes you had out to remind yourself of stuff somehow get mixed into the manuscript? Even more disturbing, I recognised passages that appear to have been copied verbatim from previous novels, and even some that repeated the exact same information as passages EARLIER IN THE NOVEL ITSELF. Copypasta and novels are not a good combination, mmmk? - Too many caves, too many greetings, WAY too many renditions of the Mother's Song. No, seriously. Cut them, and you'll singlehandedly save a forest. Wouldn't Ayla be proud? - Part 3. O lawd. This was where you actually started to offer us a reasonable amount of plot. It's a shame it's also where the book stopped being simply boring and repetitive and started being irredeemably hateful. It's like you suddenly realised that you needed some conflict, and that maybe it wasn't such a good idea to make Ayla and Jondalar win at everything ever. So you manufactured some absolutely awful drama that made me want to vomit, then resolved it with some Sleeping Beauty dreck that only served to highlight the misogynistic overtones that had already threaded their way through this book. Women who pursue careers always neglect their families and pay the price, y'all. Even if a family is all they've ever wanted. I want my money back.