The Wild Blog in the West

In case you didn't hear, Jean Auel's Earth's Children   will be headed for a television screen near you in 2015.  Only the pilot, but with a distinguished team behind it (including Ron Howard and Linda Woolverton), a series will almost certainly follow. While details are sketchy, it is likely that the show's producers intend to portray all six of the Earths's Children  books.  That should be a challenge, given that the final three installments  received their share of criticism .  But perhaps in skilled hands, even the final installments can become an emotional, exciting viewing experience.  Below are seven ways in which a television series might improve upon its source material. 1.  Better Dialogue.   Linda Woolverton wrote the screenplays for  Beauty and the Beast , The Lion King , and Maleficent , so it's safe to say that she knows her way around dialogue.  As will anyone else who comes on board.  While Auel's ...

So here we are.  Where did it all go wrong? A month or two after The Land of Painted Caves  was released, when the cynicism had fully sunk in, I dashed off this fanfic , which detailed the plot for a proposed Book Seven.  I still wish that such a novel would be released, though I have little faith that it will be.  Jean Auel hinted in 2010 that she had more material and The Land of Painted Caves  might not be her last, but that does not mean she is hard at work pounding out the story.  While Auel still seemed quite sharp in 2010 and 2011, the physical toll of writing -- at least at the pace she knew -- might be too much for her at this point. Of course if Auel does produce a Book Seven, all bets are off.  It could be the best story that she's written since The Clan of the Cave Bear , enough to dissolve our cynicism and make us fall in love with the   Earth's Children series all over again.  Or it could be drek that makes The Land of...

And so we reach the final novel in the Earth's Children series.  It is worth mentioning that for most of the time between  The Shelters of Stone  and The Land of Painted Caves , fans believed that seven novels were going to be published.  Auel had made a statement that she had enough material to produce a seventh novel.  So as the years passed, many of us hoped that the big delay was due to Auel writing the sixth and seventh novel together.  After all, wasn't that what she was supposedly doing when she wrote the fifth novel?  Since the sixth novel did not appear two or three years after the fifth, that seemed to be the only credible explanation. Then when the announcement came that The Land of Painted Caves  was Auel's last novel, many of us thought that meant the sixth and seventh novel had been combined to form a mega-novel even bigger than The Plains of Passage .  What could possibly await us?!  If Auel was going to stage the big C...

After a decade of impressive productivity, few would blame Jean Auel for wanting a rest.   The Plains of Passage alone must have been a beast from a research and storyline standpoint.  Its length is dangerously close to twice the length of The Clan of the Cave Bear . So who could blame Auel if she took a year off before starting the long-anticipated "Ayla meets the Zelandonii" novel?  If she approached it fresh, the story would only be better for it.  By the time I read Auel's first four novels, two years had already elapsed since The Plains of Passage , so I would have to wait, oh, another three maybe? And so the wait began. As the years passed, I frequented an Earth's Children   message board , where people started to question whether the fifth novel would ever be released.  Now and then Jean Auel's son would pop in to inform us of her progress (which boiled down to "No she's not dead.  Yes she's still working on it"), but Internet-ave...

Though Jean Auel's fourth installment of the Earth's Children  series is widely regarded as the weakest of the first four, it is looked upon more favorably in comparison to the final two installments. The Plains of Passage is   still "early Auel," part of a remarkable 10-year bout of productivity that produced four giant, detailed novels.  Whatever its faults, it still maintains the tone and characterization of previous novels, and it still seems to harbor some ambitions for its characters. That said, I found The Plains of Passage  to be a grind after The Mammoth Hunters .  Unlike the latter book which -- whatever its faults -- had one tense plot line throughout, the plot of The Plains of Passage is "Ayla and Jondalar travel to Jondalar's home."  That means a lot of lengthy travel sequences of variable interest, intercut with sometimes interesting interaction with other tribes. I would have found The Plains of Passage  to be a lot fresher ...

We now come to what is widely regarded as the "last good" Jean Auel novel.  Whether The Mammoth Hunters  even qualifies as good in the objective sense is a matter of debate, but I will say that I found it much more readable than The Valley of Horses . Ayla finally meets a whole group of Others like herself.  A group that just happens to be called the Lion Camp.  And happens to house a shaman who once lived with Ayla's clan, as well as a Clan-Others "mixture" like Durc.  Could it be that Ayla was meant to live with this specific group?  * pregnant pause * The Lion Camp also features the Earth's Children series first Other of Color, named Ranec.  It is with Ranec that we first get a taste of that dreaded convention: the love triangle. Happiness makes for dull reading, so it is not surprising that there is no smooth sailing once Ayla and Jondalar reach the Lion Camp.  However, what many fans object to is the extent to which the Lov...