Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

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.