I have a lot of interest in the stone age and was really stoked to pick this one up. In the end, I was more than a little let down.

The book has two modes: either it is providing rich descriptions of reconstructed Neanderthal life (for which the author did a truly impressive amount of research and filled in the gaps very believably), or it's advancing the story of Ayla, Cro-Magnon who finds herself adopted by her cousin species after an earthquake kills her family, and struggles with her differences as she ages into adulthood.

The novel's age makes it hard to read as a straightforward educational text. Even if I assume the writer did her research, anything I read will necessarily reflect the scientific consensus of fourty-five years ago - for all I know, half the things I read haven't been taken seriously by paleontologists for all of the current millennium. Having to constantly second-guess the things I was reading really took away from this part of the work.

Ayla's own story is... slow, mostly. Entire pages are devoted to our heroine's positively glacial thought process (when they're not being interrupted by more scenes of plant-gathering), a small crowd of several dozen characters fights for their own spotlight time, and as if that doesn't sound bad enough already, the novel eschews timeskips in favor of telling us, year by year, of how the found five-year-old grows into a teenager.

Then there's the B-plot, which I found extremely uncomfortable because it amounts to "Isn't it so sad how these evolutionarily stagnant but deeply spiritual people are doomed to be replaced by a fitter, smarter, better branch of humanity, who are anachronistically blond btw". One significant character's entire arc resolves around his people's inevitable doom, and I kept just waiting for those scenes to be over whenever they popped up.
 
Still, the book has its virtues. The worldbuilding is incredibly believable and very evocative, the character work is competent, and the ending wrapped everything up very nicely. The Clan of the Cave Bear isn't always perfect, but at least it's interesting.

I heard about this book on a podcast so I kind of knew what to expect but also didn’t. It’s an interesting concept although hard to read about women being so submissive and having been bred to be that submissive.

I did like seeing Ayla develop and learn to think on her own but also learn the Clan ways from Iza. Her relationship with Iza and Creb was really special.

The whole thing with Broad was really terrible, like I’m glad she stood up for herself somewhat and I hope we get the redemption of her getting to see her clan again and then finally rebelling against Broussard. Brun was an interesting character and it was nice to read his thoughts on the matter and see how Druc was accepted and all the trials that went into that.

Auel is a very descriptive writer, there were lots of sections that it felt really well researched to know about how to describe making a tool from flint, for example. I think this book was a good way to pass time, not life-changing but is interesting.