I honestly don't remember how I found out about this book, but I am not surprised that a book about dragons got caught in my radar. This is an award-winning book from a female author written in 1979, so I expected to both be excited and probably have some disappointments along the way. Unfortunately though, I think the disappointments outweighed the excitements here.
The book swaps between the narration of Lessa, a young girl seeking revenge for her family's murder, and F'lar a dragonrider. Lessa has been hiding out as a dirty servant girl in the castle where her family used to live, until they were murdered by the ambitious Fax. F'lar is a dragonrider on a Search, where they are trying to find new dragonriders. He is brought to the castle with Fax where he senses Lessa's power as she goads him into fighting and killing Fax. From there, F'lar brings Lessa to the Weyr when the dragon hatching starts. Lessa bonds with Ramoth, the queen dragon and starts to be educated in the ways of the dragonriders.
The previous Weyrleaders and dragon queen were both lazy and neglected the traditions. The country that they're in gets passed by a Red Star (implied to be Jupiter, of which they are on a moon) that sends out Threads from the sky that burrow into the ground and feed off of life. There have been no Threads in a few hundred years, so people doubt the importance of dragons and their keeping. A lot of knowledge has been lost as a result, but F'lar and Lessa believe. Anyways, a change in regime comes with Ramoth mating with F'lar's dragon, making F'lar Weyrleader. Also now the humans are a couple as well. F'lar starts trying to uncover the lost secrets of the past. Lessa desperately wants to fly and go between which is this way dragons can pass through space to get somewhere quicker. Lessa in her untrained habits then discovers that they can go through time as well, and dragons can time travel!
The Threads come sooner rather than later, and they are very unprepared. To help, F'lar sends some dragons back in time ten years to mature them faster. This is hard on those people, humans don't like being in two places at once, and Lessa discovers that the reason most of the dragons disappeared 500 years ago is because they came forward in time to their aid. She decides to go back to 500 years ago and manages to bring them forward with their knowledge, technology, and the like. The group is much more prepared to face the Threads now and can fight together!
Alright so I have a whole lot of issues here. First they're doing the whole "not like other girls" thing with Lessa as during the hatching she keeps making fun of the other girls who are terrified of the dragon (the dragonling does kill 2 of them). Not to mention that the gender of it all is handled pretty poorly in my opinion, it's never explained but it's evident that boy dragons mate with boys and girl queen dragons with girls. F'lar and the others keep making a fuss about how the girl has to be "pretty" which isn't explained until the mating. Guess they all want her to be pretty because as soon as the dragons start having sex the humans do too. Not to mention that there's a paragraph in the book about how if the dragons aren't involved F'lar is basically raping Lessa which seems entirely unnecessary.
Then there's the time travel. Seems a little ridiculous to me that Lessa would be the first person to figure out that dragons can do that at all, but even if I excuse that there's all of these plot holes that time travel introduces. The biggest being that if the dragons all disappearing contributed to the decline in their culture and traditions, wouldn't leaving them in their own time mean that the traditions would have a better chance at carrying forward? And then they wouldn't need to get the dragons from the past. Or at the very least, send them back to their own time once the Thread fighting was done. They can't all have been happy abandoning the rest of their lives and living in the future. It's a very big sacrifice for not entirely necessary gain.
There is a while series here, but I am feeling very done after this book. I respect what it's doing and that it's award winning and all that, but it is pretty clearly not for me. I don't think I could do another installment of this, I just haven't really connected with the characters and don't think I could cheer them on through more of this.
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