SPOILERS AHEAD
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Just because he's her son, doesn't mean Todd McCaffrey has inherited Anne McCaffrey's writing skills. Unfortunately for us, he's inherited the right to keep writing Pern books.
After my last experience with Pern I decided not to read any more of the Pern books that Todd McCaffrey is involved with, but when I saw this in the library after weeks of not having found anything good to read I decided to give it a try. Besides which, it had been a while since Dragongirl so I'd forgotten just how horrible it was.
Others have discussed this book's faults in great detail, but for me the main fault is that this book failed on all levels. Let me explain. The book drops you unceremoniously in the middle of events where a character Xhinna has to save some dragon eggs and the people around them from tunnels snakes and "Mrrews." There's a lot of hopping about in space and time on Dragonback after which Xhinna succeeds in setting up a "safe" camp at the top of some "broom trees" where the Mreews can't get to them. She also takes them back in time by about three years so that the dragons have time to grow and train in frighting thread.
Then we get what feels like three years of Xhinna whining about her relationships and sleeping with a bunch of different people and moaning about how it's so hard for her to lead because she's a woman, the first woman to ride a blue dragon, and she isn't accepted. This is all done without the slightest bit of character development so that the book is literally a bunch of random conversations that have no connection to each other and no influence on events. There are so many characters from past books mentioned here and there that the book is just full of these references, but nowhere do they ever attempt to give us a reason to care about these characters at all.
Then, just when Xhinna starts to actually do something to fulfill her original purpose of repopulating the weyrs with dragons and riders we cut to three years later and suddenly everyone has about three babies and they're all communally breastfeeding them and a bunch of other dragonriders have showed up from out of nowhere creating some theoretical tensions we never get to see and I'm supposed to care about all this...?
With this summary you'll begin to realize that the book fails in the following ways:
1) It fails to give us a reason to care about the main character and her initial predicament.
2) Fails to give the necessary background info to make us understand why these events are happening and where everyone is coming from and who is who. I read most if not all of the other books, but no, Todd, I will not go back and read them all just so I can figure out what is going on here.
3) Character development. It's nonexistent. I don't care who your character is sleeping with or who she says she loves I want to see her actually do something interesting and be given a reason to care about the problems she's trying to solve.
4) Failed to provide any events or plot development.
5) Failed to say anything about either the world of Pern or our own world or anything much. It was so ineffective and un-engaging that I'm sure it will be easily forgotten.
In short, this book is essentially a collection of random scenes showing us some ideas that Todd McCaffrey had for Pern, but never bothered to turn into an actual story. Why someone published this thing, which is the equivalent of story notes, I will never understand.
(And no, I'm not going to comment on the science, because that will just make me even more angry. Characters ride dragons out into space without consequence - it's beyond the realm where it deserves to be reasonably analyzed and discussed. )
If you want to read a Pern book don't pick this one. Previous books, even Anne's best, have had their problems - not little problems, big ones - but at least those had actual story, plot, characterization. At least they provided reasons for the reader to care about the characters. This one doesn't. Unless you really care to hear about a bunch of random characters you don't know much about sleeping with bunch of other random characters and then changing the diapers of some random children they had. That's really what the bulk of the book was about.
You will find no dragons here.
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