Dragonsblood is a beautiful first outing for Todd McCaffrey. It truly feels completely connected to the rest of the Pern novels. Not only that, but the triumphant ending had me in tears. The overall story line is a little complicated and there are a lot of characters to keep track of, but it really makes the world feel lived-in.
I quite like Lorana as a character. She does kind of seem like an overly-cheerful type, but that's balanced by all the suffering the poor girl went through and goes through in this book. I feel, like her multi-dragon-hearing predecessors, Lorana would, and I guess does, make a good Weyrwoman. I am glad we get to know her some before she Impresses Arith.
Wind Blossom was nice to get to know outside of the small bits in Dragonsdawn. I feel for her. Generational trauma combined with the Watch-Wher stuff could not have been easy for her. Not to mention trying to break herself of similarly traumatizing Emorra. It must have also been heart-wrenching for a healer like her to be faced with the decline in technology, as she was. I can't imagine having to go from having genetic manipulation capabilities to not even being able to synthesize antibiotics.
I honestly found the parts with D'gan extremely annoying, though they do eventually pan out plot-wise. I despise characters who are just so caught up in their own crap to the detriment of others, especially if they're supposed to be leading them. Like, sir, you're not even listening to your DRAGON when he tells you he's unwell. What. The. Fuck. Ugh. Thanks for being a despicable plot-point, though, I guess.
I'm also not going to lie, my eyes glazed over when the intricacies of Pernese DNA/PNA was discussed. That felt a little too in the weeds, but I also understand how it was necessary to explain just how different they are from the humans we're used to dealing with. Just got a little to hard Sci-Fi for my little brain to handle for a moment there. That said, the entire disease story line definitely hit different in 2024 than I imagine it did on my first read. COVID and all that. And worse, as it's the dragons affected and the human characters have little to nothing they can even do about it.
Dragonsblood is definitely a fantastic entry into the Pern lexicon.
Favorite Line
"A atarved stomach needs to learn to eat all over again." - K'tan
No comments:
Post a Comment