hotsake 's review for:

The Plains of Passage by Jean M. Auel

3.25

informative slow-paced

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Five chapters in and the story is already very frustrating. The story is 1/3 new story and 2/3 are clumsily and clunky retread of the previous books, repeated multiple times. Ayla also has an increasing and continued fascination and arousing attraction to watching and thinking about animals mating. Jondalar increasingly exists to worship and adore Ayla and prop her up as the perfect woman and to heap lots of perfect sexual pleasures on Ayla. Ayla also continues to be perfect at everything and invent every single thing that created modern society, gentling horses, creating modern dogs, science, psychological and medical concepts and procedures, etc. Ayla’s dreams were distractions in this book, she had rarely if ever had prophetic dreams in previous books, but this book is littered with them and they’re almost always repetitive. He surprising negative of the book is that it is becoming increasingly historically inaccurate. Don’t get me wrong. There were a few really excellent scenes and a few exciting ones as well. However, unfortunately that was not the norm. At the end of the day, if you took out all the poorly written, sex scenes, all the repetitive passages and all the flashbacks from previous books, this would only be a 250 page book.