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2.92 AVERAGE
2.92 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
Finally, I have finished reading the Earth's Children series. The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel got off to a slow start, but picked up in the last 250 pages. And, while it had the happy ending that we all hoped for, I did want to smack Jondalar upside the head. As for the entire series, there were things I loved and hated about it. The look at pre-historic culture was very interesting. Thinking about cultural mores, women's issues, spiritual journeys and interpersonal relationships was very interesting. But, all the description of the landscapes and animals and hunting trips got very repetitive and left me bored to tears at times. I feel that Auel could have cut book 4 through 6 in half without hurting the stories. I also felt she repeated herself on things from previous book a little too much as well. In the end, I'm glad I read them, but I'm also glad to be done and I wouldn't recommend them to someone.
This book is crap!!! Boring. Wooden dialogue. It sullies my fond memories of the earlier books in the series.
Super disappointing "conclusion". Nothing new. Rehash. Boring cave exploration for >50% of the book. Then at the very end, the only "character" or "plot" development is terrible and against the characters. Do not read
I've had this on my shelf for over a decade and finally got around to reading it. I started the series from the beginning to prepare. So not disappointed!
Rambling, duplicative, clunky, not much plot. Honestly, a half-decent fanfic writer could have done a better job with this! Is she paid by the letter or something? Or was she just obligated to churn something out to meet a contract? Is there any need to repeat the multi-page mother song or Ayla's list of titles over and over again? I still finished it, though. At least I didn't pay for it.
I just wanted this to be so much better than it was.
I just wanted this to be so much better than it was.
Lazy... that's the only word I know to describe the book. 2/3 of it is mainly endless repetitions of the Song of the Mother (after one time I know what it's about, I don't need to read it fully 10 or more times...), incredibly detailed descriptions of caves and their paintings, and in some cases even twice, because... well, why not? The story only started playing out in the last few pages, but even that was repetative... most of it we've seen in the Mammoth Hunters already and it feels lazy to repeat it again, like there hasn't been any character development at all. Pity, I had wanted a better ending for a book series I really liked and started out so strong with the first two books.
Needed a stronger hand in the editing department. So much unnecessary repetition. I was listening to the audio version, so it was harder to skip over repeats.
This is such a wasted opportunity. Given over six hundred pages to wrap up an incredibly popular series, the author wastes most of those pages on unnecessary detail, peripheral characters and unimportant occurances that have no relevance to forwarding the plot. I was bored. Major plot strands were thrown in with no subtlety and an amazing lack of skill or apparent interest, and the ending was hamfisted and cobbled together in the worst way. A disastrous ending to a great series.
I think I'm going to travel to the past, go inside a cave and start painting the walls, so that people in the future think about what I was trying to say, and more people get inspired to write another incredible book like this one.