
The following review comes courtesy of my best bud Natasha at
My Disorganized Ramblings. I always read multiple reviews of books I am interested in, since we all have different opinions, so I thought you all might be interested in reading another opinion on the travesty that is The Land of Painted Caves.
The Land of Painted Caves by Jean M. Auel
To give you some background....
The first adult book I ever read was The Clan of the Cave Bear. It is the first book in Ms. Auel's Earth's Children series. I was hooked. I read books 2, 3 and 4 very shortly after that. I was 9. No, I completely agree that these books (at least book 1) was not appropriate for most 9 year olds!
Then, we had to wait 12 long years, until 2002 before we finally got book 5. Again, I devoured it within hours of having purchased it.
Nine years later, book 6 finally hit the shelves. This was it. This was the end of the series.
And I was so incredibly disappointed. Where was her editor? I guess she can get away with it because she is so popular and has made her publisher crap-tons of money, right? Either way, I was disgusted.
In fact, I was so disgusted with the repetition in this book that I in fact made a drinking game. Yup, you read that right.
So grab your drink of choice....
I'm flexible, you can either do a shot, or take a drink of your cocktail.
The rules are:
Every time Cave is mentioned, take a drink/shot
Every time Ayla's accent is noticed by new character, take a drink/shot.
I'll have you know, that I would probably be toast by the end of the first chapter. Ayla's accent was mentioned once. Cave? It was mentioned 23 times. While the second chapter didn't mention her accent at all, it did mention cave 60 times.
So yeah, drunk out of my gourd by the second chapter!!
Over all?
Ayla's accent was mentioned a total of 41 times throughout the book. Forty-one times, a character remarked upon Ayla's manner of speaking.
Want to know how many times the word cave was written in this book? I'll tell you how many times.
1,579
(Thank god for find and replace in Word, or else this would have killed me)
I almost could have overcome that, but then the ending sucked. There was no resolution (not that there was really any conflict). The characters got super stupid. And the book just ended.
The amount of rage I felt at the end of this book was amazing.
I implore of you, beg you, if you have any love for this series? Pretend that book 5 is the last in the series.
1/5 My first ever.