I felt this book was rushed and not as fully developed in its characters as the others ,the way the adversaries of Ahla where handled wasn't fitting for their actions they got away way to easily.

This book focused on describing paintings in cave walls more than a story. I found it challenging to be captivated. There were some good happenings but the story was too drawn out. I found the good parts didn't make up for the tedious descriptions of painted caves.

A disappointing end to a great series. I was hooked on the Earth Children series from the beginning and it definitely sparked a keen interest in prehistoric humans (so much so that I visited a few caves in southern France when visiting this year) but this book fell completely flat. The repetition was nauseating! The same things described over and over AAAAND over again. Then the conflict of the story is poorly written and basically shows that none of the characters have developed in the slightest. Finally the resolution is a carbon copy of the time Ayla drank hallucinagenic roots with Mamoot in The Mammoth hunters. Auel could have done so much with this and I really wanted this to be great but it was just so so bad. Once you’ve read it go onto Goodreads and read through the reviews there to at least have a laugh at the reviews.

I started reading these books in the 80s and really fell in love with the characters and the whole story. I look at the earth children's series as one giant story with a wonderful ending the last book was not as exciting as the previous books but nonetheless I love a good ending yes I agree with Karen , that the mother story was a little over told but I just fast forwarded through it at times. Thank you so much Jean I will cherish these books forever.

I love the story of these people. The author spends so much time telling what happened in the previous books there is very little of the new tale. So many names and explaining titles is very boring! Ayla is sort of like Forrest Gump - responsible for every culture change.

It was the Worst book of the whole series. I didn’t even finish it. There are too many better books out there.

Soooooooooooooo repetitive!!!!!! I would love to hear an edited version of the series that only mentions things once or maybe even twice and that’s it. The story itself was really good. But the moments I started calling “going on a National Geographic rant” were very hard to get through. It also made it hard to enjoy the story.