| $@%&! level: Low “Bedroom” level: Medium-Low (it happens, but no descriptive passages) Violence level: Medium-High Back Cover: “In a time when the deadly scourge Thread has not fallen on Pern for centuries--and many dare to hope that Thread will never fall again--a boy is born to Harper Hall. A musical prodigy who has the ability to speak with the dragons, he is called Robinton, and he is destined to be one of the most famous and beloved leaders Pern has ever known. It is a perilous time for the harpers who sing of Thread--they are being turned away from holds, derided, attacked, even beaten. In this climate of unrest, Robinton will come into his own. But despite the tragedies that beset his own life, he continues to believe in music and in the dragons, and he is determined to save his beloved Pern from itself--so that the dragonriders can be ready to fly against the dreaded Thread when at last it returns.” |
I’m going to warn you right now--I spend about half of the book wanting to strangle Petiron for being such an unrelenting idiot. I’m glad he managed to make up for his mistakes by fostering the music-love in Menolly later on (his funeral is the opening scene for Dragonsong, and Menolly really is remarkably like Robinton in many ways), but I can’t help but feeling that the only reason he managed so well with her was because he’d learned from all the mistakes he made with his own son. I can’t deny it was a bit of a relief when he packed himself off to Half-Circle Seahold and didn’t show up again.
I have a second warning, and that is that after reading the ending of this book, you’re likely to have a deep desire to go back and read Dragonflight again. It leads so perfectly straight into it that it feels like the story isn’t properly finished until you’ve gone back and read that first book again. Now that is a good prequel.
There are a lot of things to love here. I love the first parts of the book, seeing Robinton as a child in the Harper Hall (because it really does tell his whole life story, beginning with his birth). He’s a musical prodigy, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, but also a very engaging child, and a lot of fun to read about. I love his relationship with dragons throughout, and his friendships with dragonriders. You also get to learn what F’lar and F’nor were called before they were dragonriders, and see them Impress Mnemneth and Canth, which is one of my favorite scenes. And you get a glimpse of the family that Lessa came from before they were massacred. It’s much more tragic this way, especially because I really liked her father, Lord Kale. He seemed like a good man and a good father, just not very security conscious. And there is Robinton’s love story, which is both sad (inevitably) and beautiful. I don’t really understand why he never had any more children, given the general promiscuity of Pernese society, but I do understand why he never married again. He has the kind of personality that would love that deeply only once, and wouldn’t settle for anything less.
Given that the story covers over fifty years altogether, you could say it’s a little rushed, but for once I truly don’t mind. Yes, you could have gotten several novels out of just what is told here, but it would have lost the overall plot, which is basically the decline of both society and the dragonriders and harpers within that society (and which is cause and which is effect, that’s an interesting question). It’s a record of how things got to be so messed up as they were at the very beginning of the series, in spite of Robinton’s warnings and best efforts. And it’s the story of how he got to be the man he became, who was eventually so universally beloved that his kidnapping could be potentially used to hold the entire planet hostage. (That happens later, in a book I haven’t reviewed yet.) And who am I kidding--it could be completely plotless, and as long as it was about Robinton and had a decent amount of interesting things happening, I’d still gush about it just as much.