Earth’s Children #3: The Mammoth Hunters by Jean M. Auel

Read: 13 July, 2010

Leaving the valley, Ayla and Jondalar decide to spend the winter with the mammoth hunters, the Mamutoi. During the long winter, they are estranged and Ayla encounters a strange man with dark skin. The tribe's shaman, Mamut, recognizes power in Ayla and adopts her into his hearth to begin her training.

Ayla has been something of a Mary Sue from the beginning, but it really comes out in this book. She has everything - the ability to hunt, the ability to be a shaman, perfect beauty, great strength, etc. She and Jondalar seem to be single-handedly responsible for inventing far more than seems plausible for just two people.

Ayla and Jondalar refuse to communicate, preferring instead to simply assume what the other must be thinking. As a result, they spend most of the winter angry at each other and wondering if the other still loves them. I find this kind of romance to be incredibly frustrating to read, because the obstacles are purely of their own making.

It was also a little disconcerting when Jondalar rapes Ayla, but we're supposed to continue thinking of him as a good character because he only did it because he really really loves her and it's okay anyway because she wanted it. Somehow, this makes it okay (even though she never consented and he believed, at the time, that he was raping her). Bit of a skewed moral sense there.

The book wasn't totally bad. Learning about the Mamutoi was interesting, and Ayla's interaction with Rydag (a half-Clan half-Other child) was excellent to read.

Earth's Children #1: The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

Read: 17 April, 2010

By far the best in the Earth's Children series (I've now completed book 4), Clan of the Cave Bear is also the most content-dense. While the next three books will cover a fairly short piece of the saga each, mixed in with a whole lot of filler, Cave Bear tells a much larger chunk of the story.

A little girl named Ayla is orphaned when an earthquake takes her mother, but is adopted by Iza and Creb (medicine woman and Mog-ur, or shaman, of the Clan). The Clan is different from Ayla's people, a different branch of the human tree, and Ayla must learn to fit in with people who learn by unlocking ancestral memories, and who have clearly defined gender roles. But Ayla has been chosen by the Cave Lion, a powerful totem who can help her survive with her new family.

The story is an interesting one. It goes beyond mere culture clash and into the realm of interspecies exchange. The Clan are different, physically, in the way they learn and in the way they communicate, and Ayla is reminded of that difference at every turn. But unlike many a space traveller, she was orphaned as a very young child and has no memories of her own culture, no previous imprinting to give her confidence when she comes into conflict with Clan ways. Instead, she is a blank slate that must bend itself into culture it was not designed for.

It's a beautiful story with plenty of conflict and a good dose of love and hope. Ayla, though something of a Mary Sue, is still sufficiently endearing for me to root for her.