Yuletide Rec Post the second: C-J

[lunabee34]

Earth's Children by Jean M. Auel

Ones Who Count and Ones Who Care
Jondalar/Ayla, Durc/Ura

When I was reading this series, I believed that Ayla would meet back up with her son in the last novel, but she doesn't. This fic resolves that dropped plot thread beautifully.


Hellspark by Janet Kagan

Reliability
swift-Kalat twis Jalakat/Tinling Alfvaen

Delicious world-building that reads as if Kagan wrote it.


Jane Eyre

lilacs out of the dead land
Jane/Rochester
Post-novel

Given the events of the novel, a true happily-ever-after seems impossible for these two, and this fic explores that impossibility.

Comments

[stormehowl]

My deepest heartache over the Clan of Cavebear series is just that! She never sees her son again and I had just KNOWN it would happen because ...of course! But not. And it made me so angry I vowed never to re-read that series again. Glad there is a fanfic written to fix it.

[lunabee34]

I also really hated the way the final book of the series ended. We waited so long between the penultimate and final books, and then the series ends with Ayla inventing the patriarchy!? No, thank you. :(

I love your icon! Is that a picture of you?

[stormehowl]

I also forgot to mention how much I love Jane Eyre. I've read it several times throughout the last 20 years (and Wurthering Heights is another one of those I like to reread every so often). Also, Rebecca which is pretty much a (at the time) modern Jane Eyre. I would have LOVED a follow up novel for all those novels!

That is not me - it was an old icon I saved from Livejournal days that I lost the credit for. But I love it so much because it just feels like it is me. LOL. Feel free to use it!

[lunabee34]

I love Wuthering Heights; I've read it upwards of 20 times and gotten to teach it several. I came to Jane Eyre much later, but I've read it several times and taught it a couple of times now, and I love it, too. Both are such wonderful books.

I've only read Rebecca once a million years ago back in high school. I should revisit.

It is a wonderful and evocative icon!

[kat_lair]

God damn, Earth's Children was such a defining book series for me as a teenager but also I've never read the last book and your comment above is making me want to weep. Like really, that's how we ended it?

[lunabee34]

Same same. I read the first one in middle school and finished all the available ones in high school. I waited almost ten years! for Plains of Passage and read that one in grad school, and then finally read the last one when it came out in 2011, and it was so disappointing.

She doesn't invent the patriarchy on purpose, but remember how every society is a matriarchy because they all believe that children come from the woman and that spirits from the woman and a man randomly mix to produce children. They don't believe that sex has anything to do with producing children, but Ayla does. In this book, she finally convinces Jondalar of that, and that's the beginning of patriarchy. If sex creates children, then no more indiscriminate sex. If men contribute to the creation of children, that's the end of the matriarchy and female power. It's such a bleak ending.

[kat_lair]

Ughhh matriarchy was one of the best bits about those books, why can't we have good things?

[lunabee34]

*sigh*

It is one of life's defining questions.