Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Lady of Horses by Judith Tarr. Long enough to be three books (and broken down into parts one through three), but just one really, really, really long book.

Part One was great. More than great, I enjoyed it so much that I made as much extra time during the day as I could to read more, and I stayed up late every single night to read. Much (very very much) like Clan of the Cave Bear, it was set in the early days of man, when both Cro-Magnon man and Neanderthals were both thriving at the same time. The main character, Sparrow, was living in a tribe of the more modern men. Like Clan of the Cave Bear, women were less than second-class citizens, they were given the respect and rights of herd animals.

Even as hard as it was to read about that treatment of women (especially now...) I really loved the setting and worldbuilding of this first part.

Part Two was... less great. Sparrow and another woman escape their tribe and join up with a tribe of Neanderthal people. The story got really painful here, because the Noble Savage trope was in full force. Unlike modern men, these simpler people not just thought women were equal, they took it to an extreme. It was about as opposite of the modern men as you could get: For example, everyone, man and women, walked around topless (wouldn't some women at least want some support? Especially since they were described as having "full" breasts repeatedly. Even when horseback riding, they were bare breasted). Women were the sexual aggressive ones, and they were the ones to sleep around, while men just waited to be wanted by one. More than that, the Neanderthal group didn't believe in monogamy, which would have been perfectly fine if they didn't look in wonder and awe on the modern men's tribe's monogamy.

There were so many sex scenes. So many. None of them were well written. Like Clan of the Cave Bear, the author also used different words for things. Men had "rods". Women had "secret places".

Still, even with those issues, it would have been an interesting enough story if Sparrow wasn't on the road to becoming the most powerful shaman ever.

Part Three went downhill so fast. For unimportant plot reasons, the modern men tribe was going to make war on the Neanderthal tribe. When they got there, plans changed, and they decided to enter the village as guests instead of to start war. And so they all started sleeping together.

More sex. So much sex. So much bad sex.

The modern men, who for generations only saw women as pack animals they could sleep with, just suddenly embraced women being able to do all the things they could. (Behold the power of sex!)

Add onto that that Sparrow became literally the most powerful person on the planet... (And had sex. So much sex.)

The ending was even worse though. During a battle between the two tribes, the women of the modern tribe (again, who had been for generations oppressed to the point where they weren't even permitted to look at a man) all rose up and attacked the men. Every single one of the women physically attacked, restrained, held weapons to the men. This change in the women took place in the time it took for a man to have a fistfight. Minutes.

It's really depressing when a book starts out so great and ends up so bad.