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lizella 's review for:
The Land of Painted Caves
by Jean M. Auel
While I did enjoy this book overall, most of the action seems to take place in the last few hundred pages of the book. It is interesting to see Ayla go through a good bit of her Zelandoni training, but her relationship to her close family falls to the background. Most descriptions of her daughter Jonayla involve Alya asking someone else to watch her while she goes off to do something else. Jondalar doesn't have much of a voice in this book either.
While we do get a bit more time with the First, I was hoping to learn more about her internal thought process and her guidance of Ayla into the mysteries of the Zelandoni.
The thing I found most disappointing is the resolution of the conflict between Ayla and Jondalar at the end of the book. It didn't seem that they ever really learned how to communicate with each other to avoid this type of conflict in the future. At the very least, it seems that the First might have been a bit more instrumental in helping them face each other to work it out as a friend and spiritual leader.
One of the things that I did find refreshing was the ambiguity in the growing conflict brought on by new knowledge and ways of thinking. Auel does not wrap things up in a neat bow, but lets characters grapple with things that may have negative implications on many levels and that may not have any concrete resolution.
It will be interesting to see where the next installation will go if Auel continues with this series.
While we do get a bit more time with the First, I was hoping to learn more about her internal thought process and her guidance of Ayla into the mysteries of the Zelandoni.
The thing I found most disappointing is the resolution of the conflict between Ayla and Jondalar at the end of the book. It didn't seem that they ever really learned how to communicate with each other to avoid this type of conflict in the future. At the very least, it seems that the First might have been a bit more instrumental in helping them face each other to work it out as a friend and spiritual leader.
One of the things that I did find refreshing was the ambiguity in the growing conflict brought on by new knowledge and ways of thinking. Auel does not wrap things up in a neat bow, but lets characters grapple with things that may have negative implications on many levels and that may not have any concrete resolution.
It will be interesting to see where the next installation will go if Auel continues with this series.