| $@%&! level: High “Bedroom” level: Medium (there's plenty of it, but mostly glossed over) Violence level: Medium-High (really only one brief spate of violence, but it's pretty brutal) Back Cover: “The beautiful planet Pern seemed a paradise to its new colonists—until unimaginable terror turned it into hell. Suddenly deadly spores were falling like silver threads from the sky, devouring everything—and everyone—in their path. It began to look as if the colony, cut off from Earth and lacking the resources to combat the menace, was doomed. Then some of the colonists noticed that the small, dragonlike lizards that inhabited their new world were joining the fight against Thread, breathing fire on it and teleporting to safety. If only, they thought, the dragonets were big enough for a human to ride and intelligent enough to work as a team with a rider... And so they set their most talented geneticist to work to create the creatures Pern so desperately needed—Dragons!” |
All of that means that the story doesn't really take off until Thread begins to fall, but that doesn't happen until a good way in. I'd say half to two-thirds of the book is set up for that, getting the characters into the right places, discovering the fire lizards, building a civilization and way of life up just so it can be knocked down with the disaster strikes. And since there isn't exactly a huge amount of plot in that (interesting stuff, yes, but not what could be called a story arc), you get the underhanded dealing of Avril Bitra, whose eventual death is both deserved and completely foreseeable. What I can't help but wonder is, how did that woman ever get to have a Hold named after her? You'd think Telgar at least would be up in arms about that.
And then there's the dragons. I've waxed lyrical about them before, so I won't repeat myself. It's just that reading the descriptions of how the dragons changed the lives of their riders—from this first group, which meant that no one really knew what to expect and were therefore much more observant about it—just makes me feel good. I don't know why. I also really enjoy watching them figure out how to do all the things that the later dragonriders get taught how to do, writing the owners manual from scratch. It gives me a lovely feeling of anticipation, because I (having read the earlier books) already know what they're going to learn. The joy is in watching how they learn it in the first place.