SOURCE: "Sweet Savage Love," in Newsweek, November 18, 1985, pp. 100-101.

Below, Lyons provides a favorable review and plot summaries of Auel's first three novels.

Long ago and far away. Once upon a time. For centuries, storytellers enchanted audiences with the promise of exotic imaginary worlds in which gods, goddesses, heroes, heroines, demigods and mythical beasties shared robust adventures. But such is the tyranny of facts in our own degraded time that all but supermarket tabloid customers need excuses better than mere curiosity and wonder for reading about adventure and romance. At 20 bucks a throw, novels must improve as well as divert us. Hence the immense commercial success of Jean M. Auel's "Earth's Children" series, of which The Mammoth Hunters is the third of six projected novels.

The Mammoth Hunters continues the saga of Auel's estimable heroine Ayla, the stunning blond Cro-Magnon woman orphaned by an earthquake at an early...