The elusive papery mammoth

Auel, Jean M. The Land of Painted Caves. New York: Crown Publishers, 2011.

In the last book I wrote about, the fictional Thursday Next finds the real world bewildering because coincidences happen and not everything is meaningful, unlike in the purposeful novels she knows. The Land of Painted Caves isn't Thursday's type of fiction.

These 757 pages close the Earth's Children series that started with The Clan of the Cave Bear. It is obvious that the author spent years learning about ancient cultures and filling in a story between the lines; as in previous books, the attention to minute detail is striking. Since this book was published nine years after the last (and maybe because our attention is expected to wander as we read even this one book), however, mixed with that detail is what felt like an unnecessary amount of repetition and recap. A longtime reader of the series would only need a hint at previous events, and nobody but a long-time reader would pick up this tome.

The combination of this repetition, the numerous times the Mother's Song appeared, and the lengthy descriptions of painted caves (awesome in person, I'm sure) dragged down a story that, at its core, was probably about 100 decent pages of plot related to Ayla's journey to becoming a spiritual leader. Along the way, she raises a daughter and has a blowup with her mate. Alas, the copious copulation that made the previous books such guilty pleasures is down to two relatively tame marital encounters, a stumbled-upon liaison, and a drunken encounter that ends really badly. Though it was repetitious in its own way, it used to lighten up the books. Not here.

I think this series just tried to do too much. A tale about people and relationships that has some historical speculation thrown in--and that's how I recall the early books--should be pretty engaging. Instead, we ended up with a painstaking documentation of one possible history with a little human drama thrown in. That's too much reality for BookWorld.

Rating: *1/2