After me giving The Mammoth Hunters such a scathing review, it does beg the question: is the next book any better? Let's find out, shall we? Spoilers ahead.
Now having left the Mamutoi behind, Jondalar and Ayla travel for a painfully long time across ice age Europe on their way to Jondalar's people, the Zelandani. On they way, they come across many new tribes, the dangerous glacier, and even some Clan people.
While the main crime of Mammoth Hunters was there being no plot other than a love triangle that could easily be solved if the characters just bothered to communicate with one another, the main crime of Plains is that it is just... boring. There's again very little to no plot, other than just Ayla and Jondalar traveling. It's really more a book about them coming across certain people or situations they have to solve rather than a consistent story.
I will give it credit for at least not having the horrendous love triangle anymore, but it's still full of stupidity. The sex scenes are still there and painfully stale and passionless as ever (heck, we even get a mammoth sex scene 50 pages in). We come across at least three other tribes of Others in this book, but I cared for literally none of them. They weren't even memorable and just went as soon as they came.
There's also a painful amount of repetition in this book. "Ooh, Ayla has a thick accent" or "Wolf is good with children" and "Ayla thinks babies come from sex", among others, are repeated over and over again.
The most insulting part of the book for me however was when we came across a tribe that was a woman supremacy cult. The women had all the privileges and the men they kept locked up and maimed. It was just such a lame part of the book to read and ended very suddenly and anticlimactically (Wolf just kills the leader and the problem is instantly solved).
So, yeah, while I do think this one is slightly better than The Mammoth Hunters, it's still a far cry from the great first book and okay second. Let's hope that maybe book five turns things around? Though I'm starting to give up hope at this point.
Rating: 2/5
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