I love to read.  I mentioned before how my favorite place was the library when I was younger.  I would bring home stacks and stacks of books and just devouring them.  During college, I lost this habit, and whenever I did read a book for fun, I would feel guilty for not reading something for class.  Thankfully, I do not have that problem anymore, so my library card is about to get a lot more use.    Though I haven’t done a book report in at least 11 years, I thought it would be a good exercise for me to begin reviewing the many books that I intend to devour.  It’ll help me to be a little more focused on the book and improve my critical analysis skills. 

I read mostly science fiction / fantasy books, so that’s where the majority of the material will come from, but I’ll mix in other types of books.  I also enjoy personal development (self-help) and non-sf/f fiction. 

So, without further ado:

********************************

Dragonflight, by Anne McCaffrey, is the first in her Pern series.  The premise of the series is that Earthlings have managed to conquer space travel and have colonized one or many planets in the galaxy.  Pern is one of those planets.  The events of the series happen thousands of years after contact has been lost with Earth. 

The residents of Pern are regularly threatened by spores called Thread that fall from the sky.  These . . .organisms . .. burrow into any organic material and devour it completely.  Fortunately, on Pern is a creature that is able to spew fire and burn Thread right out of the sky.  You guessed it, dragons.  Dragonriders form an unbreakable bond at Imprinting, and are able to communicate with their dragons telepathically. 

The dragons and their riders live in forts called weyrs, usually built into cliff.  The book takes place mostly in one of these weyrs, called Benden.  It starts out, however, at another place called Ruatha.  Think of Ruatha as a feudal manor, I suppose. 

Lessa, the only survivor of a raid that killed the rest of her family, the traditional holders of Ruatha, has been hiding in plain sight as a slave ever since, waiting for the day she can exact revenge and regain her home.  That chance comes when dragonriders visit her home.  Lessa is able to influence (sort of like mind control) the leader to fight, and then kill the raider that took her home so long ago.  But it turns out that Lessa is perfect for imprinting on a hatchling dragon, and so she leaves to Benden where she indeed forms a bond with one. 

Anyway, that’s enough of a summary.  I can’t say more without giving up the plot, so now I’ll talk about what I liked and didn’t like about the book.  Liked:  not much, actually.  The backstory is very compelling, but the pace seemed unnatural to me and the character development was pretty much non-existent, even for the main charaters.  I truly dislike one or even 2 dimensional characters.  In essence, I don’t want to read about the goings on of book characters.  I like to read about people.

The biggest thing that prevented me from enjoying the book was how Lessa was written.  You’d think that someone that, at the age of eleven, was able to make herself wait and bide her time for revenge under the rule of the person that killed her family would be consistently even tempered, or at least have the appearance of it.  But Lessa is written as a capricious, hot-tempered girl.  I hated it.  It’s like the author takes great pains to TELL us that this is a woman who is calculating, smart, able to hold her own and would never let anyone control her.  What she SHOWS us is a girl who can’t control her impulses and lets the menfolk do all the work.

There are a few other things that I disliked, but that was the biggest one.  Now, don’t discount the whole series. I read another book called Dragondrums, that I really enjoyed, but if I read this one first, I wouldn’t have read any others. 

**************************

Writing this was harder than I thought.  I haven’t had to really think about the things I read in quite a while.  It was fun, though.  I’m looking forward to doing more complex ones.