The Earth's Children series

Author: Jean M. Auel

First Published: 1980 (Clan of the Cave Bear)

Caught by the Fuzz: A lot. This series is #20 on the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Challenged Books of 1990-2000. That means it's received more challenges--attempts at banning or censorship--than, for example, The New Joy of Gay Sex (#28) and The Anarchist's Cookbook (#57). (Where's Waldo? comes in at #88, for no reason I can fathom.)

Trivia: An archeological dig actually found a Neanderthal skeleton in the position described at the end of Clan of the Cave Bear, curled fetally and clutching a giant ochre rock. Some archaeologists claim that Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans did indeed mingle and even interbreed.

What Happens: I have to admit that I've only read the first three books. By the time The Plains of Passage and The Shelters of Stone came out, I had moved on as a reader, and I'm not patient enough to go back for those two now.

Anyway, in the first three books, Ayla, a precocious blonde Early Modern Human, is orphaned and adopted into a Neanderthal tribe. She learns their ways but is eventually exiled; she is too headstrong and independent to conform to their very strict gender roles. She lives on her own for years before meeting Jondalar, who has embarked with his brother Thonolan on a foot tour of Eurasia, bedding women wherever they go. Thonolan dies. Ayla and Jondalar fall in love and join a tribe of Early Modern Humans. Along the way Ayla turns the Ice Age steppes into a sort of prehistoric Menlo Park; she invents domestication, sewing needles, several major weapons, flint rocks, one method of tanning leather, quite a few herbal remedies, and birth control. Presumably by The Shelters of Stone she has moved on to agriculture and the Roman arch. But it's the birth control that's really important, because she and Jondalar have a whole heck of a lot of S-E-X.

It becomes necessary to invent a word. Biblioscoliosis is the condition a book acquires when its spine becomes so bent that the book automatically opens to certain pages. That is the condition of my copy of The Mammoth Hunters, and I am willing to bet that every copy of that book that falls into the hands of an eighth grader acquires the same condition in more or less the same places.

The writing is, unfortunately, pretty sloppy. Occasionally a contemporary idiom clashes with the prehistoric setting, so you'll have a stampeding mammoth indirectly compared to a freight train. As you reread the salacious passages, you notice that all sorts of modifiers are dangling along with the naughty bits. This means that sometimes someone who is clearly supposed to be performing a certain act on another character is, thanks to a trick of wording, actually performing the act upon himself. It is glorious when feats of grammar correspond with feats of anatomy.

What Else: Thonolan sounds like the name of a birth-control drug, doesn't it? Ask YOUR doctor about new once-a-week Thonolan!

Value as Literature: Negligible, I'm afraid.

Value as Erotica: Earth's Children : Internet :: flint rocks : Zippo. But when you are in eighth grade and you don't have the Internet and oh my god, did he really put his hand on her Plains of Passage?--then these are the best books EVER.

Credit Where It's Due: Auel has done some serious research. She's thought about almost every aspect of the societies she describes. She knows the purpose and growing season of each herb in Ayla's remedies. These details succeed fantastically. You do have a sense of being there as some sort of privileged observer of cavemen (and -women). And nearly 20 years after I first read Clan I still remember many of the characters' names; that definitely counts for something. The story's implausible, the writing is lowbrow, the sex is dirty--so very dirty--but that's sort of the definition of a fun read, isn't it?