Wouldn't have read if it hadn't been on the list, but...

I substituted Valley Of Horses for The Clan Of The Cave Bear because I'd already read Clan and couldn't bear reading it again.  This one wasn't nearly as bad, just way...too...long.  I expect a writer to do her research but that doesn't mean every single bit of it has to be crammed into the finished work.  There are too many huge, honking descriptive paragraphs that read like non-fiction, which might have been fine if I were reading non-fiction.  Non-fiction is a different style of reading, for me--it's a whole different "attitude" about the material and how I expect it to flow.  This book kept making me switch between the two different styles of reading and it irritated me.

And--a personal quibble--there's such a thing as too many words.  If, for example, you describe a horse as a "small filly the color of hay," then do you later need to say, "...watching the hay-colored horse..."?  Is it possible that the author edited this book simply by adding a bunch of words to enhance the "color" and increase the word count?

In any rate, I more-or-less finished the book and I enjoyed a little of it.  Of the 500 or so words, I read about 300--beginning, end, and some of the middle.   Such careless reading behavior would have been inexcusable if I were ever going to read a sequel, but I'm not.  Cro-Magnum man will have to procreate the world without me.