What do You think about Dragon's Fire (2006)?
Todd is really grasping to find problems for Pern to deal with that don't involve some form of lord holder misbehavior. This time it's firestone that explodes when it touches any amount of water (sweat included, yet the moisture in dragons' mouths doesn't make it erupt somehow). So they have to solve this problem somehow. That seems like a stretch to me, but I'm not prepared to reject this book on that reason alone.The worse problem in my opinion is that none of the characters in this book seem to have any reason for the things they do or feel. Why does the main male lead take a liking to the girl he does, for instance? He has a fine speech about it at the end of the book but the words are coming from a place that doesn't exist on this plane of reality.This is where I decided to stop reading novels of Pern, and from what I've seen on the shelves I'm not regretting it. The chief problem in the next two novels I saw was a plague. We had a plague in the last novel. That's three plagues in 4 books. Come on.
—Foomy
Blech.Either I'm getting too old for these or this book wasn't up to par. Too much exposition. I had difficulty differentiating characters (miners and bad guys). I didn't really care for any of them. It'd been so long since I read the previous book that it took me a while to figure out they were dealing with the same set of circumstances. I realize they wanted to make the one Weyr's second gathering flight the same as last time, but it's just plain laziness to cut and paste the description from the first part of the book. And the last line is so cheesy I actually groaned. As I closed the book, I said, "Well, that was a horrible book." Not horrible enough for me not to finish it, however. I don't know if it was optimism or nostalgia that kept me going. I'll probably even read the next one just because I want to know what happens in the story.
—Jeanne
So this book in the Pern series is getting one star less than I have given any of the others I have read thus far. This is mostly because it's just not as good. The book could have done with a lot of improvements. I enjoyed the general plotline. I liked the idea of looking at Pern from a different person's point of view, and one that didn't necessarily include a dragon in the forefront. Initially everything seemed pretty good as far as I was reading, but I quickly realized that I couldn't invest in the characters. I wasn't afraid of what was going to happen to them. I wasn't holding my breath and wondering if they were going to survive. There was also the matter of the ages of most of the characters. Most of the main characters were very young, (9-12-ish) yet they were doing things far above their ages. Now I don't say that's impossible, but it felt forced, as if someone was trying to make the books more accessible to a younger age group, rather than making the children older and continuing to write to the audience that already loves the Pern series. And that is what I found myself doing. I mentally changed the age of the children in my mind so that they were older and then everything flowed a little bit better. I also felt that the "love story" aspect of the book was poorly done. There is no real contact between Pellar and Halla to persuade me that they loved each other. There was nothing more than a few brief moments of time in which they interacted slightly and yet Pellar's intrigue with her habit of leaving yellow flowers on graves some how indelibly attracts him to her. It's rather flimsy and a bit of an insult to the other love stories in the Pern series. That all being said, I liked the Telgar Weyrleader being the bad guy to an extent. I love seeing an evil dragonrider more fully portrayed than I have in other books. I also enjoyed the plotline about the firestone. It took me a little bit to remember that firestone hadn't always been so delicate, but I thought it was well played out for the most part. Again I feel like everything should have been better fleshed out and less thrown together, but it was a generally decent book.
—Meaghan
