Howdy, howdy my name is John
and this video is a review of the book
The Land of the Painted Caves
by Jean M Auel. This is the sixth
and final book of the Earth Children's
series. On the whole,
I enjoyed this book and I'm going to
give it four stars.
The beginning of the novel, like many of
the others
in the series, is a bit of a slow start.
The beginning of the novel follows Ayla,
Jondalar,
and several others as they take a tour
of the surrounding caves
that have paintings in them that was
done by their ancestors.
This part of the novel gets to be a
little bit repetitive
and it kind of reads like someone
writing about
visiting an art museum. Just to give you
a sample of the repetitiveness, it's
like, "ooh there's a horse", "ooh
there's a lion", "who painted these?,
"the ancients", "what does it mean?",
"we don't know". So imagine the first half
of an
800 page novel that reads like this.
However, the second half is very interesting because it
showcases what Auel does best, complex
human relationships.
Ayla has discovered something that
we kind of take for granted today
and I'm not going to tell you what it is
in this video, I'm
going to save that for my discussion
video.
This discovery has impacts in
the community at large and it drives
much of the conflict of the last half of
the novel.
Editor John here. In my review of
the previous novel, The Shelters of Stone
I noticed that that novel had too many
antagonists.
All of those antagonists show up in this
novel,
but really I think it could have been
reduced down to just
two and then that would have tightened
the story up.
Also, as the final novel of the series
it wraps up most of the plot lines
that the novel had set out it. It does
serve
as a good conclusion to the series. It's
not perfect
but it is satisfying. I'm definitely glad
I've read this series.
I'm going to do a review of the whole
series
for those of you who are interested in
giving it a try and I'm going to do a
discussion video
about the about the entire series so
that we can discuss spoilers. Thank you for
watching this video
and I hope you enjoyed the rest of your
day.
