A review by danilanglie
The Shelters of Stone by Jean M. Auel

1.0

Whyyyyyy. Actually this book is a slight, slight improvement over the previous one, because at least there are more people around, which prevents a bit of the boredom of spending a whole novel with just Ayla and Jondalar, the two most boringly perfect protagonists ever. But saying that this is better than Book Four is not saying much at all, and this atrocity still gets one star from me.

More repetition. Ayla tells her back story to everybody she meets, and we get to hear it all like five or six times in this novel alone. Not to mention the fact that we already experienced the whole thing in excruciating detail over the last four novels! Also, everybody in Jondalar's family has these infuriatingly long name with all of these titles that they have to say during formal introductions. In a normal book, you might say all of these titles once, and then just say "so-and-so and so-and-so were introduced formally" whenever you needed that to happen again for the plot. But no. We get the full fuckin' list of titles over and over and over again and my brain nearly exploded.

Ayla is perfect. She's beautiful, she's nice, she's intelligent, and almost everybody loves her instantly. The few people who don't like her only dislike her because either a) they are jealous of how awesome she is, or b) they want her for themselves and they are jealous that Jondalar gets to have her. Whenever anybody tries to harm her, their attempts fail instantly and Ayla gets the upper hand without trying.

The sex scenes are still painfully horrible. Luckily there aren't too many.

That's all I have to say. What a freakin' joke of a novel.