Dragonheart by Todd McCaffrey

Dragonheart is honestly the slowest Pern book I've read to date. The absolute minutiae of Weyr life is explored here, along with the challenges of "timing it" through three years at an otherwise abandoned Weyr. By the end, I was reading every other page and missed nothing. Just so... much... superfluous... detail... and the tantalizing stuff isn't even explained!!

So, Dragonheart does start out during the Dragon Plague. However, since everything interesting about the Dragon Plague is happening over at Benden, instead of Fort, there's nothing out of the ordinary going on. Just day-to-day Weyr stuff and Fiona getting accustomed to it. Cut to the "timing it" portion of the story and it's more of the same, only with Fiona as The Weyrwoman rather than the youngest. Fiona's not a bad character, but this storyline just goes on forever. The pacing is horrendous.

Also, the "timing it" is not at all a spoiler if you've read any of the previous Pern books in the chronology. Just the way Fiona and her fellow Weyrlings act... it's really obvious what's causing it. Especially with the length of time it affects them for. I'm honestly over "timing it" basically being the story, especially with it being as uninteresting as it was in this book.

I did enjoy parts of Dragonheart. Bright spots included the Traders and Nuella. I kind of liked getting a bit of alternate cultures being explained. A good chunk of my Pern experience has been in and around Benden Weyr, so finding out that Igen was definitely more Southern in climate and culture was nice. Kind of would have liked to see Igen Weyr at it's prime, though not under D'gan... but that's neither here nor there. Technically, the "culture" bits were centered around the food and switching up sleep schedules, so it wasn't that deep per-say... but yeah. Nuella continues to be a delight. I've enjoyed her character from the get-go.

But anyway, I'm very glad to be done with Dragonheart. It wasn't exactly bad or badly written, just tedious.

Favorite Line

"Every day is a test," Cisca replied soberly. "But we'll never learn new ways of doing things if we insist on telling everyone what they should be doing."