Pentapod reviewed The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel (Earth's Children, #1)
Review of 'The Clan of the Cave Bear' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
I would probably have liked this book a lot more if I'd read it as an early teen. By the time I was over about 16, I think the extremely dubious biology errors would have put me off somewhat. And as a full adult I can also see a lot of innate racism embedded in the book, intended or not, and find it harder to overlook the author's very patchy writing style too.
First of all, it's the story of a blonde, blue-eyed homo sapiens child who loses her family and clan in an earthquake and is rescued and raised by the eponymous clan of homo neanderthalis. She is described as stronger, taller, smarter, and (to the reader) clearly prettier also than all the poor primitive neanderthals, and through the book manages to invent or deduce a highly improbable number of inventions/discoveries from better hunting techniques to genetic theory. The …
I would probably have liked this book a lot more if I'd read it as an early teen. By the time I was over about 16, I think the extremely dubious biology errors would have put me off somewhat. And as a full adult I can also see a lot of innate racism embedded in the book, intended or not, and find it harder to overlook the author's very patchy writing style too.
First of all, it's the story of a blonde, blue-eyed homo sapiens child who loses her family and clan in an earthquake and is rescued and raised by the eponymous clan of homo neanderthalis. She is described as stronger, taller, smarter, and (to the reader) clearly prettier also than all the poor primitive neanderthals, and through the book manages to invent or deduce a highly improbable number of inventions/discoveries from better hunting techniques to genetic theory. The author's choice to specifically make her a blonde, blue eyed Aryan ideal and repeatedly call this out in contrast to the neanderthals consistently described as short, dark, and primitive is unpleasant, whatever the conscious intentions were.
The biology ranges between questionable and ludicrous. I could manage to suspend disbelief at the highly dubious and unlikely claims that neanderthals have some kind of inherited genetic tribal memory so they're all born with the memories of their ancestors, but at one point the author states that neanderthals have reached a point where they stopped learning new things because it would make the race's heads even bigger if they kept learning more, and therefore babies would be harder to give birth to. THAT'S NOT HOW THIS WORKS.
And then the author's writing style overall is very annoying. She alternates between stream-of-consciousness type writing from the characters' point of view, which sounds like patronizing baby talk, and weird forced exposition interjections where she dumps technical details she's clearly gleaned from the research papers and books she read. Stuff about occipital lobe developments and geological data and species differentiation, etc. Yeah, it's great you did all that background research before writing the book, but it didn't need to be decanted into the novel in quite such detail and at such random times.
I hear there's hot caveman sex in the sequel (also our amazing blonde protagonist continues to invent everything short of the automobile) but I'm not sure I can bring myself to read any more of the trilogy. There was no hot caveman sex in this book, but trigger warning for rape scenes.
