![]() ![]() There’s an explicit discussion of consent between Ayla, who had no concept of it, and her mentor. There’s a completely unremarked on interracial relationship between Ayla and another dude in The Mammoth Hunters ( A | BN | K | G | AB ) (and it’s outright stated that there are a number of people who make journeys to far off places and come back with partners from the Far East and Africa, and no one is perturbed by people of different races). They tend to be very repetitive as Ayla meets new people (who all notice, in order, that she’s impossibly beautiful and has a slight speech impediment), and the descriptions border on mind-numbing.Ī | BN | K | ABBut, as the twitter conversation that inspired this post ranged on, there were things that we remembered with great fondness. Look, there’s a lot of ridiculousness, and the last three books ( Plains of Passage, 1990, The Shelters of Stone, 2002, and The Land of Painted Caves, 2011) have a lot of storytelling problems. (It’s a real problem for him, guys.) He’s the best at sex in the whole of Eurasia. Jondalar is VERY good at this ritual, except that his penis is large, so he needs to be careful. See, all of the cultures they come across, all of them have this concept of “First Rites” where a young woman has ritualized sex for her first time, with an experienced man, and an emphasis placed on her pleasure and safety. ![]() ![]() Jondalar is the earliest hero (in terms of when his story takes place, not in terms of publication date) having a Magic Peen, as Kat from BookThingo pointed out. She did figure out the connection between sex and babies, and then, because sex creates babies, the men got all worked up over paternity, thus inventing the patriarchy. She did not invent soap – that was somebody else they met in Germany or something – but she probably made it better and scented. ![]() She’s stronger and smarter and can diagnose illnesses that no one has ever heard of, she can learn languages faster than anyone else ever, makes the best flint tools, leather, baskets, food, and weapons, can use a sling better than you, and AND if anyone meets her and doesn’t immediately love her, they are a bad person.Ī | BN | K | ABShe also invented the needle, the atlatl, digitalis, animal domestication, the travois, the bra, and surgical stitches. She’s blonde and gorgeous and “exotic looking” and can do everything anyone can do but BETTER. So much happens, and it happens a lot.)ī) pages upon pages of meticulous researchĪyla is the Mary Sue GreatGrandmother of us all. (I know this is the barest bones summary you can imagine, but there are six books and they’re all 500 pages long. They meet and fall in love, meet a bunch of other people, go back to Jondalar’s home in France, and Ayla becomes a religious-leader shaman-type person. At the same time, Jondalar, the series hero (kind of) starts a journey from what will be France along the Danube river, ending up in Ayla’s valley. It’s also pretty rapey in parts – the Neanderthal society is extremely male-dominated and the son of the leader of the group hates Ayla, so he uses rape (what we would call rape, they don’t have any concept of it) to dominate her.Ī | BN | K | ABAnyway, things go badly, she’s exiled, and ends up in the next book living alone in a valley somewhat north of the Black Sea for years where she domesticates a horse and a lion (kind of) and discovers that you can use flint to start a fire. There’s a LOT of herbal medicine and discussion about how to use a sling to hunt and make things out of flint and how food is gathered and preserved. CotCB is about a group of Neanderthals who find a Cro-Magnon toddler, Ayla, and raise her. (It’s Plains of Passage, by the way.)įor anyone who missed the true heyday of the Earth’s Children series (and oh, HOW MUCH YOU MISSED), it started with Clan of the Cave Bear, published in 1980. I remember a disturbing amount of details of what events happened in which book, who was who, and precisely which book involved Ayla and Jondalar getting down and getting busy with a bit of role play after watching mammoths mating. Auel and the Earth’s Children’s series, her long (very long) (oh so long) series about the adventures of Ayla, a prehistoric woman who invented basically everything and her arm candy Jondalar as they trek across Ice Age Europe 30,000 years ago and accidentally invent the patriarchy (along with basically everything else).įor a lot of us, this was an early experience with books that involved peen and sex and a LOT OF SEX. Once upon a time on Twitter, a discussion broke out about Jean M. ![]()
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