You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mgmason_author 's review for:
The Plains of Passage
by Jean M. Auel
After the soap-ish love triangle of the third book I opened this with trepidation but feeling happy that the blurb made it seem more like the first two in the series.
What we have here effectively is a road trip with no roads but a whole lot of tribes, creatures, landscapes, environmental dangers and mobility problems to think about. Some fan reviews I've read state that the heavy description and little action made this dull, I must confess that this for me was amongst the books strengths. I continue to take pleasure in the description and Auel's research even though I concur that there are few actual events. Here we really get to explore a significant part of ice age Europe as they follow the Danube westwards.
Of course there are weaknesses, it is over-written. Conversations covering old ground go on for tens and tens of pages. Every time Ayla wants to stop to collect medicinal plants or they spy a particularly juicy deer, they hold not one but two conferences. The first beforehand to discuss whether they should stop and a second afterwards to discuss what they did and the implications for their journey. This does get tedious and the book could have lost at least 150 pages for the sake of flow.
It doesn't really get interesting until the halfway point so if you are an impatient reader, you won't lose anything in skim-reading the first few hundred pages.
I'm also a little fed up with being told how beautiful and generally awesome the pair are as they travel Europe single-handedly advancing technology to the backward tribes, liberating the oppressed and being begged to stay with everyone they meet. It also gets boring to hear about how sickeningly perfect they are and how perfect for each other they are. Please, just tone it down for the last two books?
With two books to go, I am in no hurry to complete the series but I know I will. Reading it I can't say I found it enjoyable but I can see that Auel put a lot of hard work into it and for that I appreciate it more than The Mammoth Hunters and consider it a more solid work than The Valley of Horses.
See more book reviews at my blog
What we have here effectively is a road trip with no roads but a whole lot of tribes, creatures, landscapes, environmental dangers and mobility problems to think about. Some fan reviews I've read state that the heavy description and little action made this dull, I must confess that this for me was amongst the books strengths. I continue to take pleasure in the description and Auel's research even though I concur that there are few actual events. Here we really get to explore a significant part of ice age Europe as they follow the Danube westwards.
Of course there are weaknesses, it is over-written. Conversations covering old ground go on for tens and tens of pages. Every time Ayla wants to stop to collect medicinal plants or they spy a particularly juicy deer, they hold not one but two conferences. The first beforehand to discuss whether they should stop and a second afterwards to discuss what they did and the implications for their journey. This does get tedious and the book could have lost at least 150 pages for the sake of flow.
It doesn't really get interesting until the halfway point so if you are an impatient reader, you won't lose anything in skim-reading the first few hundred pages.
I'm also a little fed up with being told how beautiful and generally awesome the pair are as they travel Europe single-handedly advancing technology to the backward tribes, liberating the oppressed and being begged to stay with everyone they meet. It also gets boring to hear about how sickeningly perfect they are and how perfect for each other they are. Please, just tone it down for the last two books?
With two books to go, I am in no hurry to complete the series but I know I will. Reading it I can't say I found it enjoyable but I can see that Auel put a lot of hard work into it and for that I appreciate it more than The Mammoth Hunters and consider it a more solid work than The Valley of Horses.
See more book reviews at my blog