It’s a very detail look on what life could have been like in the Ice Age, with some exceptions. (Like I doubt if the Clan’s brand of mysticism was real.) It’s compellingly well written and engrossing. I like the sense of scope and enviorment, the characteration is great. The author created believable characters and it’s a wonderful narration of the struggles to exist that primitive man had gone through.

It all starts out with a young girl (a Cro-Magnon, who weren’t unlike us) being orphaned and injured. Against all odds, she is picked up and nurtured by the Clan–known to us as Neanderthals.

The heroine, Ayla, isn’t annoying or cloyingly helpless. She exhibits a normal desire for living and freedom in the Clan’s repressed and unadaptable society. Her reactions seem normal for that kind of situation she had been forced into. It’s interesting reading about someone making their way through a foreign culture…and it also shows the reader the basic need to fit in that we all have.

And there’s a hidden message that sometimes, no matter how much we want to, we can’t fit in. When we can’t, we just have to pick ourselves up and find a place that we do belong.

Other books in the series:

• Valley of Horses
• The Mammoth Hunters
• Plains of Passage
• Shelters of Stone