The Land of Painted Caves, the sixth (and last) in Jean Auel's "Earth's Children" series has been sitting in one place almost since I got it. Unread.
I really want to read it. Scratch that. I don't want to read it. I want to have read it. To know what happens and how the story ends without actually going to the bother of reading it. Reading a novel is not something that should be a burden. And, to my thinking, if you're in a novel and find you don't enjoy it, then put it down There are other novels out there.
But I've read the other five books in the series, and I just have to know how things turn out for Ayla and Jondalar. And their daughter, Jonayla. Yes, Jonayla. Oy.
The first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear, was very good. Great, even. It's a stone age fish-out-of-water story, set in Europe when the human family tree had more than one living branch. A little girl, a member of the branch that would produce today's modern humans is orphaned and taken in by a band of cavepeople whose branch would die out. Their ways are different than hers, but it's more than just a difference of custom.There are fundamental biological differences that make it difficult for her to acculturate. It was quite the page turner -- very compelling. It was also made into a movie starring Daryl Hannah, which sucked. The trailer is below.
The sequel, The Valley of Horses, followed Ayla after leaving the tribe that raised her. And it introduces a love interest, Jondalar, who would be with her for the rest of the series. It was also a good novel, but nowhere near as good as the original. The Mammoth Hunters was still enjoyable, but was, in some ways, a prehistoric version of Beverly Hills 90210.
Those were the three novels that were out when I first got interested in the series, sometime around the time I finished college. I picked up the fourth book, The Plains of Passage, as soon as it came out in 1991. By this point, the downward trend (qualitywise) was well-established and seemingly irreversible. But, as I noted to people who would discuss it with me, I had to know what happens. There were, generally speaking, two things that annoyed me about the series. The first was the way Ayla had become some kind of super human wonderwoman. As the story tells it, she's responsible for millenia of human advancement -- in weapons technology, in domestication of animals, in medicine. It gets kind of boring after a while. And then there's Jondalar, her man. He's not quite the genius she is, but he's sure close. And he's the perfect lover. Just right for Ayla the Goddess. My other problem was that each book was longer than the previous one. That wouldn't be a problem if the books had progressively more story to tell. But they don't. They just have more and more of what my grandfather called the "berry-picking passages" -- stretches of exposition describing the flora and fauna, and the prehistoric cooking and construction techniques. Auel had done a lot of research, and made sure it didn't go to waste.
In 2003, Auel released The Shelters of Stone. And I bought it and read it as soon as it came out. But the downward trend had continued, and it was little more than a soap opera with the berry-picking passages. The Land of Painted Caves came out in 2011. I didn't rush out to buy it. I decided I'd wait until I could borrow it from the library. Given my relationship with media at the time, that was definitely a bad sign. I never did get it from the library. It was always out from my local branch, and I never wanted it enough to put in a reservation. Eventually I bought a copy at a thrift store for like $1.50. I may have overpaid. At any rate, I read the beginning. It was some hunting scene, which was interesting enough. But then came the long boring crap following group dynamics and long descriptions of prehistoric technology. At some point I put the book down for the night, and never picked it back up.
I still want to get to the end. Just to know what happens, and to be able to have that closure. But I just don't want to bother...
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