This book has many flaws but for its world and culture-building I love it. The descriptions of the ceremonies stick out as highlights and the main characters (Ayla, Iza, Creb) are well developed so that I cared about them. I’m also a sucker for descriptions of herbalism and wilderness survival + stories driven by a mother’s love (beginning with Iza for Ayla). 

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.

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.

Top tier world building and information overload!! Once you get into the thralls of the story, it hooks you. 

The MC is a source of inspiration and courage. 😌🤌🏻

Don't let anyone, define who are you and set your limits.

Clan of the Cave Bear follows Ayla, a Cro-Magnon girl who is adopted by a tribe of Neanderthals following an earthquake. I liked the characters, but the character list at the beginning spoils what will happen with Broud and Ayla resulting in Durc.

It’s clear he will rape her and Durc will be their son with Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal traits.

It was only helpful in letting me know Creb and Mog-Ur were the same person. For someone who sounds like a textbook, Auel wasn’t super clear that it was a title and not a name. 

Some of my fellow reviewers mentioned Auel’s writing style. I found it interesting as an imagining of life in pre-history, but yes some of the flower and plant descriptions were a bit much and comes off as textbook-like. I can see that putting off some readers. It also does start off slow and only picks up later. 

Once the story does pick up, I was deeply invested in the characters, especially Iza, Creb, Uba, and Ayla. Brun is a good leader character and our antagonist Broud is positively loathsome, even before

he raped Ayla. But Durc is adorable. There is the bit where Ayla is excited to have a baby to help her cope with the rape. I understand this can be off-putting, but to me it is how she copes. She wants a baby and rejects the idea Broud helped make him. It isn’t a consolation prize to her for putting up with him, but a miracle.

Twenty-six is elderly for these people so they grow up much faster. We get to see their daily lives and traditions, which were interesting. I loved the totems and how they conceptualized spirits. The curses, the gatherings every seven years, the hearths, all of it and lore makes the clan feel very realistic. One very embarrassing review is kind of upset sexism exists as if it isn’t the oldest form of bigotry ever. The tribe’s sexism is hard to read about and deeply upsetting, but it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable. Ayla is able to do things that go against it by thinking it’s what her Cave Lion totem wants. The reader will think about how “civilized” and egalitarian we are, but then will thousands of years from we be looked upon as backwards and cruel? (Assuming progress is mainly linear of course since we seem to be going backwards as I type this). 

Another embarrassing review mentions no LGBT characters. As a homosexual, true homosexuality is very rare. Did you read this and wish some poor homosexual were in this story being raped? Did you read Creb being described as not a true man for being disabled and agree? Would him being “not a man” have made the story better? It betrays a total lack of understanding of the true purpose of “third genders”—to other homosexual or otherwise “abnormal” men. No woman would be allowed to opt out of her sex based role. 

The story could be better and I agree the ending is very much for a sequel.

If Auel ended the book well, Broud would have died at the cave-in and Ayla would have been able to stay to raise her son.

But then apparently we wouldn’t get the next book, which is a sex-fest? Auel, I don’t want to know what your sex life is lacking. I’m sad about it, but I guess I won’t be reading the next book even if I enjoyed this one despite its flaws.