The first of the series, The Clan of the Cave Bear, begins with Ayla, a Homo sapien, who is orphaned and lost, being picked up by a travelling group of Neanderthals somewhere in prehistoric Europe. Being a different species Ayla has difficulty fitting in: blonde haired, blue eyed, gangly as a giraffe, unable to communicate and with totally different ideas about what ‘women’s work’ entails. Talk about teen angst. I could relate. Just stepping into the library at lunchtime made me a totally different species from the rest of my school.

            Over time, the clan comes to accept Ayla’s funny looks and unusual brain. She’s given a cave lion totem spirit (a sort of animal guide/fairy godmother) because of a scar on her leg from childhood when a cave lion scratched her. The clan believes a woman’s totem spirit must be fought monthly in order for it to be overcome by a man’s and the woman fall pregnant (periods explained! This was better than Dolly). Because Ayla has such a strong, masculine totem, no one believes she will ever have a child.

The clan has an unusual approach to sexual intercourse and women’s rights: the two just don’t go together. One young man, Broud, the leader’s son, inflicts socially-sanctioned rape on Ayla, and she becomes pregnant.

Now, if the phrase ‘creative license’ hadn’t occurred to my fourteen-year-old self yet, it certainly did then. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbreeding? I was a long way from university genetics classes, but that just didn’t seem right. Willing to meet Auel more than halfway, I pressed on.

The Clan of the Cave Bear ends with Ayla being banished by Broud, Amish-style, with everyone pretending they can neither see her nor hear her. In the following four books, Ayla has further interesting and successively racier adventures. In book two, The Valley of Horses, there are so many throbbing members popping up I could barely open the book on the bus wide enough to read it for fear of someone peering over my shoulder. Forget Debbie Vickers and a tub of vaso in the back of a Holden panel van. This was truly the stuff of sexual awakening.

My school librarians merely smiled indulgently as I red-facedly borrowed books three and four, The Mammoth Hunters and The Plains of Passage, and told me how much they had enjoyed them.

I didn’t work out until years later that I wanted to write, but The Clan of the Cave Bear was a seminal book of my adolescence, and opened my eyes to what grown-up books were like. No more Goosebumps for me.

Photo by: steev-o