Dragongirl (The Dragonriders of Pern)

 
Young Fiona, rider of the gold queen Talenth, has returned from the past, where she and a group of dragons and riders fled so that the wounded could heal from their previous battles with Thread and the younger dragons could safely grow to fighting age. Gone only three days, yet aged more than three years, Fiona is no longer a child but a woman prepared to fight against the Thread that threatens to destroy her world.

Fiona’s life takes a pivotal turn when a shocking tragedy thrusts her into a position of authority. Now she finds herself leading weyrfolk who have a hard time trusting a senior Weyrwoman who is both young and an outsider.

But even greater challenges lie ahead: Thread is falling and there are too few dragons to stem the tide. Many have died from the recent plague, and even with the influx of newly mature dragons from the past, the depleted fighting force is no match for the intensifying Threadfall. Fiona knows that something must be done, and what she proposes is daring and next to impossible. But if her plan succeeds, it just might save them all.

With a cast of familiar characters from previous Pern novels—including Lorana, who sacrificed her own queen dragon so that all the dragons of Pern would have a chance to survive, and Kindan, the harper Fiona has loved her whole life—Dragongirl is another triumph for Todd McCaffrey, and a riveting new chapter for the Dragonriders of Pern.

While I generally applaud Todd's efforts to continue the Pern series and I'm sure he had a great story in his head, this book was poorly executed. There either isn't enough story here to justify a book and it wasn't fleshed-out or there was too much and it was edited away.

I have read and enjoyed all of the Pern novels, including the first two books in this trilogy. I'm not a Pern zealot but I am familiar with the epic, the current main characters and history, and the situation at hand. Still reading Dragongirl is like being a listener to an `inside' or `family' conversation, where one has an idea what is going on but isn't privy to everything the characters know.

Dragongirl is extremely repetitious, both descriptively and conversationally, sometimes using the exact wording. No one would want to hang around these characters for very long because they always say the very same thing, over and over ....and over. Casual conversations among the story's characters are random and very detailed, but pointless; conversations that might drive the story are vague, unfinished, and routinely cut off.

The whole `timing it' issue became muddled and, I think, began to conflict with established information from prior stories. The author has every right to break new ground and establish new `traditions' or make exciting discoveries in the grand epic of Pern, but it all begins to collapse if the `rules of play' are randomly altered without basis, particularly one as central to the larger story as `timing'.

Maybe it's time for a new story line. I'll read it if Todd writes it, just to give him encouragement.

this story seemed to drag. would expound on crisis's and when they are solved was abrupt with little lead in. excessive character dialog that has little corrilation to the over all story. I will be happy to see anne returning to helping write the next installment other wise i dont think i would buy the next book.

The story was too full of dialogue and not enough of the story-telling genius of the original story-teller.
I enjoyed it but...it falls a little short.

a very good read. I like the way the story started with out any gaps in the story line. I will be waiting for the next book, to come out in may.

The steep fall in the quality of the Pern series can't be laid solely at the feet of Anne McCaffrey's son Todd McCaffrey as Anne's later books in the series themselves widely varied in quality from downright bad (a few) to mediocre/adequate (most) to not-real-good-but-pretty-good (a few). But at least one could kind of justify the existence of most of them (not all) as they wrapped up characters we'd grown to love or gave us the prequel backstory of how the whole setup began or kept us in the familiar and beloved setting but gave us new situations. But pretty much since the point Todd began co-writing the books with his mother, or, the last few years, written his own, it isn't just the quality of the books that's questionable, but their very reason for being. The simple fact is we've seen these types of characters and these specific plots too many times and the books have suffered from a major lack of originality, along with a pretty big drop-off in writing craft (at least in comparison to the first seven or eight).

Those same problems bedevil the most recent Pern book, Dragongirl, which is why I can't recommend it. In terms of plot, there's just nothing new here: undermanned dragonfighters urgently fighting thread against the odds, dragons fighting off a plague, use of "timing", mating flights, a character who can talk to all dragons, a character feeling her way into a position of authority, hatchings and impressions, dragonriders mourning their dead dragon, etc. We've seen all of this in nearly every book, and the few issues that don't arise in every book (plague), we've now seen in three or four at least. Do we really need to see any of this again?

Even worse, not only is the entire book repetitive within the series, but the individual scenes in the book are maddeningly repetitive within its own limited scope. Multiple scenes with the same conversation over how there aren't enough dragons, multiple scenes with people doing math to figure out there aren't enough dragons (yes, math scenes), multiple scenes worrying over the number of eggs in a clutch, discussing records, and so on.

Beyond the issues with unoriginal and repetitive plotting, the writing simply isn't very good. Scenes seldom feel full enough or smoothly integrated, but instead read like a bunch of mostly perfunctory plot points one after the other. The book is probably 97 percent dialogue, but the dialogue is far from crisp, compelling or sparkling and too often falls into cliché. The many, many discussions on "timing" just bog the book down--it's rarely a great idea to have a concept that characters are constantly confused about as a major topic of conversation throughout a book. The prose is adequate at its best moments and just bad at its worst (best to simply avoid the poetry). Characters have little depth and most are pale shadows of characters we've seen before; to be honest, I simply didn't care what happened to any of them.

Unfortunately, the book resolves some matters but leaves others hanging, ending not quite in a cliffhanger but at a point requiring a follow-up book. Personally, I hope it's the last; it's well past time to put Pern to rest.