Iza's brothers are older still: Brun is the leader of the clan, and the other brother is Mog-ur, a kind of pagan priest. Most of the girls develop into women at the age of about eight, and have their first babies when they are nine or ten. She is considered very old to be doing so. Iza is twenty, and expecting her first baby. People matured rapidly in prehistoric times, apparently. Most want to ignore her - she looks totally different from them, and is only a girl anyway - but the medicine woman, Iza, wants to adopt her. Ayla manages to fend for herself for a few days, and even escape a vicious cave lion, before she is discovered by a passing tribe of Neanderthal. I should mention that the book is set about thirty-five thousand years ago, in central Europe around the time of an ice age. Then she loses her entire family in an earthquake, and wanders a long way before she finds other people.
'The Clan of the Cave Bear' is about Ayla, who we first meet at five years old, a contented and secure child who loves to swim. I'm always pleased to find a new writer, so I spent a little Christmas money on ordering the first in the series. I had never heard of Jean M Auel, or the 'Earth's Children' series, until a friend said she had recently re-read the whole series, and found them gripping.
0 kommentar(er)
