SOURCE: "Primordial Passions of the Pleistocene Times: The Flesh Is Willing, But the Diction Is Weak," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 12, 1982, p. 3.

In the following review, Sales finds the plot weak and the dialogue anachronistic in The Valley of Horses.

The Valley of Horses, Jean M. Auel's sequel to her blockbuster novel The Clan of the Cave Bear, set in ice age Ukraine, 30,000 BC, is a well-researched children's story fleshed out with steamy primordial sex, women's lib, soap opera plots and "Me, Tarzan, you, Jane," dialogue.

One must admire the painstaking anthropological research Auel has poured into her proposed trilogy. Even readers turned off by the gimmicky form this novel assumes may find fascination in the technique of human survival in the late Pleistocene Epoch: weapon-making, horse-taming, the invention of bow and arrow, the early science of herbal medicine, boat building, and much conjecture on primitive...