Remember Ayla, the Cro-Magnon orphan who was raised by a tribe of less-evolved Neanderthals in Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)? Well, now, having been cursed and exiled by new tribe leader Broud (who raped her), Ayla must abandon baby Durc and go searching for her own species ("The Others"). So off she goes to the Eurasian North—on foot and alone. . . until she reaches the Valley of the Horses, finding "a nice cave" where she can settle in for the winter. And about half of this novel (#2 in Auel's Earth's Children series) details Ayla's self-help progress in the wild: she refines her already-impressive hunting and nursing abilities; she nurtures a foal ("Whinney"), discovers a neat trick called horseback-riding, invents the travois; she accidentally learns how to make Cure via stone-sparking; she mothers a baby lion ("Baby"), she becomes the world's first female to braid her hair; and she frets about the whole matter of mating—which, despite her past experiences, she doesn't quite understand. Meanwhile, however, in alternating chapters, Ayla's obviously-destined Super-Mate is on his way. This is big blond Jondalar of the Zelandonii, who reluctantly sets out on a Journey with young, impetuous brother Thonolan: they follow the "Great Mother River" (they're from an advanced, Mother-worshipping clan that scorns the Neanderthal "flatheads" as "animals"); along the way, Jondalar helps a friendly clan with his special expertise at deflowering virgins (" 'Jondalar man, Noria woman,' he said huskily. . ."); when Thonolan is wounded by a rhino, they're taken in by the Sharamudoi, a hunting/fishing/boating tribe that Thonolan eventually marries into; but, after Thonolan's wife and child die, the brothers travel on again. Eventually, then, they reach the Valley of the Horses—where Thonolan is promptly killed by Baby (who's no baby anymore). . . while Jondalar, seriously wounded, is nursed back to health by Ayla. Will these two find mating magic? Of course. But first Jondalar must teach culturally deprived Ayla how to speak—and must overcome his revulsion when he learns that Ayla is the mother of a half-flathead. (His anti-flathead outburst brings out the Barbara Stanwyck in a now-articulate Ayla: "If I could make a choice between human and animal, I'd take the stinking hyenas!") So finally, quarrels resolved, Ayla is introduced to Jondalar-style mating, oral sex is invented ("Oh, woman! . . . How did you learn to do that!"), and Ayla gets ready to join semi-civilization. As before, Auel's dialogue is often hiloriously anachronistic, suggesting a Saturday Night Live cave-man sketch. And Ayla's sugary chats with Whinney and Baby are on the icky-juvenile level. But, though this has less tribal texture than Cave Bear, the anthropological details and the hard-core sex again make an earthy combination—so Ayla followers can probably be expected to return for more Stone Age action.
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1982
ISBN: 0553381660
Page Count: -
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Cha’s storytelling shows how fiction can delicately extract deeper revelations from daily headlines.
A real-life racial incident is transfigured into a riveting thriller about two families’ heartbreaking struggles to confront and transcend rage and loss.
It is the late summer of 2019, but no matter how many years have passed, Shawn Matthews, a black ex-convict now working for a Los Angeles moving company, is burdened by memories of the early spring of 1991, when his teenage sister Ava was shot to death by a Korean woman who mistakenly believed she was stealing from her convenience store. The shooting and the resulting trial—in which the woman was convicted and received no jail time, after which she relocated to another part of LA—fed into racial tensions already festering back then from the Rodney King trial. And the city’s reactions to a present-day shooting death of an unarmed black teen by a police officer indicate that those racial animosities remain close to the boiling point. In the midst of the mounting furor, Grace Park, a young Korean woman, is shaken from her placid good nature by the sight of her mother being wounded in a drive-by shooting. “What if she is being punished?” her sister Miriam says, revealing a shocking fact about their mother's past that Grace hadn't known. An LAPD detective asks Shawn if he has an alibi for the drive-by (which he does). Nonetheless, the most recent shooting upends his fragile sense of security, and he starts to wonder where his cousin, Ray, himself just released from prison, was when Grace’s mother was shot. Cha, author of the Juniper Song series of detective novels (Dead Soon Enough, 2015, etc.), brings what she knows about crafting noir-ish mysteries into this fictionalized treatment of the 1991 Latasha Harlins murder, blending a shrewd knowledge of cutting-edge media and its disruptive impact with a warm, astute sensitivity toward characters of diverse cultures weighed down by converging traumas.
Cha’s storytelling shows how fiction can delicately extract deeper revelations from daily headlines.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286885-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.
Rome, past and present, serves as the setting for a sparkling historical novel.
Smith (Free Men, 2016, etc.) bounds through 2,000 years of history, following four indelible characters as they grapple with questions of faith, freedom, and transgressive love. Tom, a biologist working in contemporary Rome, is studying ostracods, tiny crustaceans that thrive in polluted, agitated environments. “Are they adapting in the face of disadvantage or are they opportunists of collapse?” Tom asks, aware that his question about ostracods could just as well apply to his own emotional agitation. The married father of a 9-year-old daughter, he has met a young woman who enchants him, impelling him to confront his desperate desire for “an unleashing” and for a love deeper than what he feels for his wife. A child playing in the water where he is investigating suddenly shrieks in pain, pierced by a piece of bent metal, “scaly with corrosion, its silver marred with patches of orange rust.” It is a fishhook—maybe a castoff with no value or perhaps an ancient relic: uncanny, miraculous. The fishhook reappears as Smith leaps back to the Renaissance, where it falls into the hands of Giulia, a mixed-race princess newly married to a Medici, pregnant with another man’s child. For Giulia, her fortunes embroiled in political and religious rivalries, the fishhook evokes a holier time, before corruption and hypocrisy sullied the church. In ninth-century Rome, Felix, a 60-year-old monk, is tormented by his youthful, forbidden love for Tomaso; assigned to watch over the decaying bodies in the putridarium, Felix comes into possession of the fishhook, guessing—wishing—that it belonged to the martyred St. Prisca, who perhaps “got it direct from Jesus.” In the year 165, Prisca did indeed find the hook, secreting it as a precious token. Drawn to worshipping Christ rather than pagan gods, 12-year-old Prisca stands defiant against her violent tormenters. Perhaps Smith’s most appealing character is Satan, whose weary, ironic comments punctuate a narrative that shines with lyrical, translucent prose.
A compelling, beautifully rendered tale of passion and pain.Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287364-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
