The Shelters of Stone opens as Ayla and Jondalar, along with their animal friends, Wolf, Whinney, and Racer, complete their epic journey across Europe and are greeted by Jondalar’s people: the Zelandonii. The people of the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii fascinate Ayla. Their clothes, customs, artifacts, even their homes—formed in great cliffs of vertical limestone—are a source of wonder to her. And in the woman Zelandoni, the spiritual leader of the Ninth Cave
(and the one who initiated Jondalar into the Gift of Pleasure), she meets a fellow healer with whom to share her knowledge and skills.

But as Ayla and Jondalar prepare for the formal mating at the Summer Meeting, there are difficulties. Not all the Zelandonii are welcoming. Some fear Ayla’s unfamiliar ways and abhor her relationship with those they call flatheads and she calls Clan. Some even oppose her mating with Jondalar, and make their displeasure known. Ayla has to call on all her skills, intelligence, knowledge, and instincts to find her way in this complicated society, to prepare for the birth of her child, and to decide whether she will accept new challenges and play a significant role in the destiny of the Zelandonii.

Jean Auel is at her very best in this superbly textured creation of a prehistoric society. The Shelters of Stone is a sweeping story of love and danger, with all the wonderful detail—based on meticulous research— that makes her novels unique. It is a triumphant continuation of the Earth’s Children® saga that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear. And it includes an amazing rhythmic poem that describes the birth of Earth’s Children and plays its own role in the narrative of The Shelters of Stone.
Jean Auel's fifth novel about Ayla, the Cro-Magnon cavewoman raised by Neanderthals, is the biggest comeback bestseller in Amazon.com history. In The Shelters of Stone, Ayla meets the Zelandonii tribe of Jondalar, the Cro-Magnon hunk she rescued from Baby, her pet lion. Ayla is pregnant. How will Jondalar's mom react? Or his bitchy jilted fiancée? Ayla wows her future in-laws by striking fire from flint and taming a wild wolf. But most regard her Neanderthal adoptive Clan as subhuman "flatheads." Clan larynxes can't quite manage language, and Ayla must convince the Zelandonii that Clan sign language isn't just arm-flapping. Zelandonii and Clan are skirmishing, and those who interbreed are deemed "abominations." What would Jondalar's tribe think if they knew Ayla had to abandon her half-breed son in Clan country? The plot is slow to unfold, because Auel's first goal is to pack the tale with period Pleistocene detail, provocative speculation, and bits of romance, sex, tribal politics, soap opera, and homicidal wooly rhino-hunting adventure. It's an enveloping fact-based fantasy, a genre-crossing time trip to the Ice Age. --Tim Appelo

Customer Rating:
Summary: long awaited
Comment: We wait sooo very long for new books in this series that sometimes it's almost as though they were reads eons ago. I wanted this book to come out much more quickly than it did. But it literally took me a couple of years to read. I kept putting it down because I just couldn't get into it until after reading at least 100 pages. After that point I ravaged through it. Ms Auel could possibly have condensed this one somewhat. It hasn't deterred me from the next in the series. Whenever that comes along.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: how disappointing!
Comment: I agree with a lot of the other low reviews of this book. The only good thing about it is that I borrowed it from my local library (doing so in protest of how long it took the author to release the book!) so I didn't actually buy the thing! There was just too much borrowed content from the previous three books, almost as if the author ran out of ideas and took from the previous three in order to fill her quota for the publisher. As a fan of the previous three books, this rehashing was totally unnecessary for much of the borrowed material was hard to forget, even if you hadn't picked up and re-read any of the previous three books in that ten year span it took to finish the series. IF you're a fan of the series and haven't read this book yet but are dying to see how it all ends, I suggest you do what I did and BORROW the book from a library so you can give it back when you're finished!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Very disappointed
Comment: Very disappointed with the content and wrap-up. With the time it took to write and research, it seems that Jeal Auel was quick to add content that took away from not only this book, but the entire collection. Maybe to add pages or get more readers - I was really put off by the, lets say, pornographic genre scenes scattered within the pages of what could have been a great follow-up to the Plains of Passage.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Riviting
Comment: Absolutly riving - as good as all of her others. My only disappointment was coming to the end of the book!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: 600 unnecessary pages.
Comment: While I am a BIG fan of the 'Earth's Children series and bought every volume, I was extremely disappointed in the final book 'Shelters of Stone'. Remove all the flowery scene descriptions and constant recapping of the previous 4 volumes and the book would have been no more than 100 pages. What a let down after such an incredible journey. I doubt a 6th volume would fill the void left by this blunder.

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