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.

This book is indeed well written and takes you into another world fully. But boy is it a dark book. A lot of errors and obstacles. Way too dark for me. But still left me wanting to know what will happen next…

Interesting premise and ideas, but the graphic content made it extremely difficult to enjoy

At the age of five, Ayla finds herself orphaned when an earthquake kills her family. 
After surviving in the wilderness for days, she is discovered by another Clan who take her in.
As Ayla grows up she struggles to conform to expectations of the Clan:  the prejudices, superstitions, distrust and hatred of her because she doesn't look or behave like one of them.
This was an interesting story but overlong on description and explanation in places.

This book was a tricky one. The general world building was great and the concept was really interesting. I loved the detailed descriptions of how the people use nature to survive. 
However, the writing is very slow and at times is far too descriptive. I found myself skimming sections describing things I felt just didn’t matter. 
Also, the rape scenes are completely unnecessary. It followed the typical fantasy trope of rape being a plot device and providing character growth for a woman which I hate. It was incredibly graphic. The behaviour of the clan clearly showed Ayla’s alienation, the raping wasn’t necessary to add on top. It added nothing to the story. I think it’s meant to provide some kind of sexual awakening when she meets Jondalar in the second book and realises that sex is good. But that would be achieved anyway because it could have been ‘no one wanted me and no someone does’. 
I also hate that she stops being effected by being literally raped just because she knows she has a child and is happy about it. Really sick