Earth's Children by Jean Auel

I was excited to hear that Jean Auel is releasing a further installment to her Earth's Children series this year on Mar 29th. It's called The Painted Caves/ You can read the first 3 chapters of Painted Caves HERE on Jean's site. There's also some free wallpapers etc to download.

It's been almost 25 years since I read the very first one, Clan Of The Cave Bear, so a re-read is almost mandatory in order to re-cap the story so far. One of the problems her fans have is the length of time in between books. I think the longest gap has been about 12 years. The last one, Shelters of Stone was 9 years in the making. Or something like forever. Must be worth the wait though, judging by how many fans she still has, even after all this time.

I actually started re-reading these last year (before I knew about the newest one) but was taking it slowly as there's quite a lot of story to take in. So far I've made my way through the first three books again - Clan of the cave bear, Valley of Horses and The Mammoth Hunters. I was just about to start the fourth one Plains of Passage when I heard of the new release. I'm finding that they're still great stories but I'm just not gripped like I was the first time around. Maybe it's because my reading preferences have changed, although not that much I wouldn't have thought, but I suspect that maybe it's because my younger self didn't have a lot of epic books to compare with. In the last 20+ years I've read hundreds of books (both good and bad) and have a better measuring stick when it comes to what I like.

Anyway, I'm going to get up to speed and get through the next couple so I'm ready to go when number 6 arrives. The only thing that's bugging me so far about them, is that everything seems to be repeated a million times. It's as if Jean thinks her reader's have the memory of a hen. Perhaps she thinks that we don't re-read and so need countless re-caps throughout. Might be true for some, but it just bugs me no end to have to go over old ground all the way through.

There was even a movie made of the first book and although it was pretty dire (the movie, not the book) I still watched it at the time. On my travels last night to find out the new book's release date I stumbled on a site where you can watch the movie for free (if you're in the UK). It's highly edited from the book, there's virtually zero dialogue and all in all it's a pretty poor movie but Daryl Hannah does her best with what she's got to work with. Might only appeal to fans of the book but a free movie is a free movie - right? I had to get the hankies out and had a bit of a blub at the end there... I'm such a softie for stuff like that in movies. Maybe I'm hormonal :D

Anyway, get the free Clan of the Cave Bear movie HERE


Details of Earth's Children and the newest release is on Jean Auel's website

Book reading order as follows:

Earth's Children Series:
1. The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980)
2. The Valley of Horses (1982)
3. The Mammoth Hunters (1985)
4. The Plains of Passage (1990)
5. The Shelters of Stone (2002)
6. The Land of Painted Caves (2011)