Book 9 of the Dragonriders of Pern series
Genre: fantasy
Format: hardback
About Dragonsdawn:
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.Source: Info in the About Dragonsdawn was taken from GoodReads at http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/465904.Dragonsdawn on 12/06/2012.
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!
Review:
I've read the Pern books like donkey's years ago. I didn't realize I missed this one though... Reading Dragonsdawn has reminded me why I loved the Pern books so much! It's the masterful story telling quality that Anne McCaffrey is known and loved for. Her author's voice is just so compelling that it was only at the end of the book that I realized that this book didn't actually have much of a story in it! That alone tells us that the story telling quality must be really good indeed for me to miss that! The book didn't have much of a substantial or structured story where you have a beginning, a middle and an end. This book is a hodge podge of short Pern stories which are all related in the fact that all three of it are about the experiences of the first human immigrants to Pern. This book made me think that although Anne McCaffrey is such a good story teller, story building is not her strong suit, as shown by this book.
I found a fan made dragon rider art... apropos!
If you are an old Pern fan (which I am), you will lap this book up! If you are not, Dragonsdawn may not be the best book to read as an introduction to this series.
Story telling quality = 5
Character development = 5
Story itself = 2
Ending = 3
World building = 5
Cover art = 4
Pace = 4.5
Plot = 2
Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 cherries
Two adolescent drakis went on a dangerous escapade and almost got killed. Then Jacinda compounds that by being overconfident and got wounded. And it doesn't stop there. The entire book is peppered with a string of stupidity from cover to cover. I read the synopsis on the subsequent books and it looks like this trend continues through the entire series. The stupidity is so annoying it eclipsed the beauty of the world building, the mesmerizing voice of the narrator and the good story telling quality. That tells you just how TSTL Jacinda is! That there are times I wanted to shake Jacinda fiercely to knock some sense into her. Even I can see it was totally stupid. But our Jacinda, she can't see past her nose. Not only that, she's not only TSTL, but selfish to boot! Safe to say that I found it difficult to connect with this main protagonist. I think I would have cheered if the bad guys would actually catch her because then Jacinda would now actually get what she keeps trying to do! Would I recommend this book? This series? No. Don't waste your reading time. I don't know why the publisher wasted money on this book to begin with!
But here is the real kicker, it ends in a cliffhanger...
. I don't read gay books. Outside my comfort zone. And this book has an element of gay theme in it. However the author presented it in such a way that it wasn't sordid and overtly sexual. It came across as beautiful even to a non-gay-book reader like me. The sad thing about this book is that it is a novella ebook and there aren't anymore stories in this series. This is it! And I want more stories about how Yakov and Malachi fared. And how the kids coped and grew up to be. I want to read more of this world of Drekken which is wonderful, peopled with sentient beings capable of acts of great evil and of goodness. Strenght of the human heart in the midst of bleak circumstances and fighting for survival. And there aren't anymore of that
. Wish this author would write more books in this series. The ending is just slightly predictable but it wasn't the ending itself that I like, it was the journey towards it that I enjoyed!
. And so I went and bought a dvd copy of this movie as soon as they had it on sale at 
I have to say that for an animated film, this one does not shot down the "
So much so that I bought Book 2 of the 
.
