Book 23: The Plains of Passage

TITLE: The Plains of Passage
AUTHOR: Jean M. Auel
STARTED: September 2, 2015
FINISHED: September 21, 2015
PAGES: 868
GENRE: Fiction

FIRST SENTENCE: The woman caught a glimpse of movement through the dusty haze ahead and wondered if it was the wolf she had seen loping in front of them earlier.

SUMMARY: [From BN] With her companion, Jondalar, Ayla sets out on her most dangerous and daring journey--away from the welcoming hearths of the Mammoth Hunters and into the unknown. Their odyssey spans a beautiful but sparsely populated and treacherous continent, the windswept grasslands of Ice Age Europe, casting the pair among strangers. Some will be intrigued by Ayla and Jondalar, with their many innovative skills, including the taming of wild horses and a wolf; others will avoid them, threatened by what they cannot understand; and some will threaten them. But Ayla, with no memory of her own people, and Jondalar, with a hunger to return to his, are impelled by their own deep drives to continue their trek across the spectacular heart of an unmapped world to find that place they can both call home.

THOUGHTS: I really love this series, but this book was very repetitive. Auel herself calls this the "Travel Book," which is fine by me because it did some excellent adventuring, but she could have cut out about 200 pages. It bugs me a bit that the author assumes readers have never read her previous books and/or have the memories of goldfish and can't remember what happened 100 pages back. Other than that, I very much enjoy the story and emotion. This series is turning into a bit of an Outlander read for me. It's not so much about the writing and the plot but, rather, joining along in a lifelong ride.

RATING: 6/10 [Good]

Comments

Kristy said…
I felt the same way. I read the first 4 in a short-ish amount of time and the 4th was so repetitive that I didn't continue. Maybe some day.