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99 of 106 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Repetition, repetition, repetition, May 5, 2002
By A Customer
Did I mention repetition? I came away feeling somewhat lukewarm towards this much-anticipated book. Definitely, there were enjoyable parts to it, even parts that moved me to tears. However, this book had a much different pace to it than what I've come to expect from this series. For every event, it reviewed experiences from the earlier books in tiresome detail. Later in the book, it even reviewed experiences that happened in the first part of the book. And, really, how many times did we have to read about the people's first reaction to meeting Wolf, Whinney, and Racer? Yes, the animals were new to the people, but they were not new to the readers. Recounting the same reaction from the dozens of people that met the animals as well as the never-ending recitation of all the formal names and ties of the characters made for tedious reading. I'll admit to skipping the long narratives to get to the action. In the earlier books I was fascinated at Ms. Auel's extraordinary talent of setting the scene with lots of rich details. In this book, it just seemed to make the story plod, maybe because I had read most of it before. This book is a definite, if somewhat disappointing, read for those that have been captivated by this series. I find myself eagerly awaiting the next book. I only hope the author once again warms to her subject and the plot instead of relying on page-fillers from past books.
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89 of 97 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
I Waited Twelve Years for This Drivel?, May 11, 2002
My first reaction when I finally turned the last page of "The Shelters of Stone" was "I waited twelve years for THIS?" Indeed, the only thing that made me stick with the reading until the last page was the forlorn hope that Auel would stop repeating herself and maybe something interesting would happen. Like many "Earth's Children" fans, I waited with bated breath to see what might finally happen when the sexy cave hero Jondalar brings the even sexier cave heroine Ayla back home to meet his people. We'd already been led in previous books to believe that Ayla's introduction to the Zelandoni would be anything but smooth. The Zelandoni (we have been told) believe that the Neanderthals who raised Ayla are animals and any children produced from Neanderthal-Human trysts are "abominations." Particularly intriguing were what we imagined might happen when Ayla met Jondalar's old love, Zolena (who is now "Zelandoni of the Ninth Cave," and who in a mere five years has become a gargatuan image of the woman Jondalar loved; so we no longer have to anticipate a conflict between Ayla and the most powerful Zelandoni priestess. Would've been fascinating, but oh well!), his old ex-fiancee Marona, and his powerful but prideful mother, Marthona. How would Ayla, whom we know as fiercely protective of her Neanderthal adoptive family, react to a people who might judge her based on her past history with these "animals?" We couldn't wait to find out! And what would Jondalar do, who in previous books was torn between his intense love for Ayla and his worry over what his family might think? Oh please tell us! So, what happened? Ayla meets Jondalar's family. They think she's kind of strange, but nice (several of them fall in love with her). Ayla meets the rest of Jondalar's people. They think she's kind of strange, but nice(several of them fall in love with her). She goes to the Summer meeting and meets a lot of other people. Mostly, they all think she's kind of strange, but nice (several of them fall in love with her.) A few think she's kind of strange and are intensely jealous that everyone else thinks she's nice ... although it is made clear that anyone who doesn't love Ayla has serious problems. One of these is the Cave drunk, who lusts after her body but is offended because she's given more status than he. Then there's the ex-fiance Marona, a character who isn't even believably realistic. She turns out to be a pouty,juvinile acting brat whom one doubts Jondalar would have ever actually had anything to do with. The meeting of ex-fiancee and Ayla is so predictable it took effort to get through it. Truth be told, the entire book took so much effort to get through that I skipped or skimmed large sections ... something this reader rarely ever does! The *best* thing about the former books was the intensely erotic love scenes. I once thought that Auel wrote better erotica than anyone else I'd ever read. Well, something happened between the last book and this one because even the cave-love has lost it's draw. While an intergral part of former stories, the erotic scenes in this installment seem almost an afterthought, as if Auel would rather be writing something else (such as another endlessly detailed description of the making of cave-objects, baskets, mats, clothing and the like)and inserted the love-scene only because she knew the readers expected it. About the endless descriptiveness, especially of early human culture: a bit of this is fine and added to the original book's appeal, but it almost seems as if "Shelters" was written so that Auel could exhibit her meticulous research and theories as to how life was lived then, as if the story was a mere frame for a display of the research, rather than the other way around. If I want to learn every detail of how to live like a cave-man, I'll take a survival course. I buy a novel to be entertained! Tell me a story! Even the animals, formerly the real charmers of the stories, succumbed to this book's long-windedness. Do we really have to be told *every* time Ayla goes to check on the horses? Do we really need repeated descriptions of how astounded people are when they first see tame animals? Do we really have to hear the story of how Ayla discovered domestication of animals as many times as this book subjects us to it? Even the attempt at tear-jerking fails; every crisis encountered in the book is resolved so anti-climactically we drop our hankies unused. The constant repition of a "poem" in the book ("The Earth Mother's Song")annoyed me to no end. Auel ought to leave poetry to people who know that craft, yet she is so infatuated with her own amateur-quality poem that she repeats it constantly and in fact even has a special repeat of it all by itself at the end of the book. Late in the book Ayla delivers her baby and promptly names her without stirring a single emotion. Nothing like the dramatic and soul-searing deliver of Durc, her half-Neanderthal son, in the hallowed 1st book, "Clan of the Cave Bear." Auel makes many references to the need to live in harmony with the environment throughout her entire series. She might've done the environment a favor and not written 700+ pages of pure drivel. If she wanted to bore us she could've done so in 300 pages or less. Or better yet, just issued a press release saying she didn't really know where to go with this story anymore, because it seems obvious that she doesn't. Yawn.
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235 of 267 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing doesn't begin to cover it., May 3, 2002
By A Customer
...The Shelters of Stone is not a good book, and it is not a bad book that is fun. It's such an incredible departure from Auel's other books that I question whether she actually wrote it herself. Let me tell you why.In the previous Earth's Children books, she tended to get somewhat flowery and overblown with descriptions of, say, prehistoric tundra landscapes or intricate cultural customs. But the overblown descriptions were at least engaging. She's never been a master of character development -- the characters have always been very one-sided, with the good people being superhumanly good and the bad people being very, very bad -- but at least she made you care about the characters to some extent. And she's never been particularly excellent at writing dialogue, but at least every once in awhile she'd hit upon something poignant, or funny, or interesting. None of these things happen in the Shelters of Stone. The book is a cold, stilted, haphazard, frankly [weak] attempt at continuing the story of Ayla, who loyal readers have known and loved and been following for over 20 years now. The characters are cut from cardboard and stuck in at random intervals where it seems convenient, not to move the story along. Not that there's much of a story -- frankly, about 3/4 of the book is exposition from the previous 4 books. Very little actually happens in Shelters of Stone that you haven't seen happen in the previous books. Ayla and Jondalar meet the Zelandonii, and then every time they meet someone new there's the endless round of introductions, they have to explain Ayla's background, how she got the animals, the spear-throwers, the firestones, etc. etc. ad nauseum. There is thankfully much less explicit sex in this book than in the former books, but Auel more than makes up for the tedious sex scenes with the tedious exposition of covered territory over and over and over. Events that should be touching -- weddings, deaths, births -- are glossed over or ham-handedly dealt with, but then followed by pages and pages of Ayla and Jondalar explaining Ayla's background, which we've known the most intimate details of for four books now. I found myself skipping large portions of chapters just so I could get to the next part that actually had something to do with the story. The dialogue between the characters is so awkward it's painful at times -- it sounds like an 8th-grader's first effort at writing a skit for the school play. The narrative, dialogue and plot careen from point to point, emotion to emotion with seemingly no direction or finesse. Some of the details that have been consistent through the last four books are now different in this book, like the spelling of a major character's name. There were some great opportunities to tell parts of the story we hadn't heard before, about Jondalar's background, but none of those were explored in favor of having Ayla explain for the umpteenth time to some person how she trained Wolf. Also, whoever edited this book needs to be fired, because on top of the numerous problems discussed above, there are comma splices, sentence fragments and other grammatical problems throughout the book. Maybe Ms. Auel was given final edit; if so, that was a really, really bad idea. If Ms. Auel was a new writer and not an established author with several bestsellers backing her up, there's no way this book would have seen the light of day. There are too many literary problems with this novel to even enumerate here. Frankly, the book stunk. It was painful for me to read it, and I was actually sorry afterwards that I had spent money on a hardback. I wanted so much to love this book. I had a bad feeling when I read the first two advance chapters in my bookstore late last year -- the writing just didn't seem up to par with her previous efforts. I honestly believe that Auel only wrote maybe 25 percent of the book, and the editors hastily cobbled together the other 75 percent out of the last four books. I understand there's a sixth book in the works. I'll be waiting for the (used) paperback on that one. It kills me to say this, but if this is the best Auel can do, maybe she should think about retirement.
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