Things you find while cleaning out your closet. While I truly love the Talent series, the Tower books (taking place around 300 years after the end of the Talent series) are a dicier bet. "The Rowan" I'm still generally good with, but the quality slides after that, just recycling without end. "Lyon's Pride" is the fourth book in the series, and... yeagh.Story-wise, this one's so-so. It's fractured into a few different storylines, but really the most effort is put into the who-will-end-up-with-who plotting. The hard sci fi stuff is dealt with in such a dry and clinical manner that it's almost in outline form, just pieces of plot that have to move the rest of the story forward so someone can marry someone else and start producing a crazy amount of children. There's a political subplot that doesn't go anywhere. The one thing I will say about this book is that there's an event that happens in the first few chapters that I have never really forgotten from when I read it as a teenager. As storytelling goes, that was great. But one engrossing plot twist does not a book make, and certainly can't halt the series' downward slide.McCaffrey's entire career supposedly started as a pushback against the ridiculous female sci-fi characters of the 50s, but when read today her female characters rub me the wrong way. They are very, very different from the male characters, which just seems odd. They're emotional and sometimes capricious and broody and... it bothers me, especially because almost ALL of them are like that. The men on the other hand are square-jawed charmers who are routinely in the middle of the action. Why? 300 years into the future, and we're still seeing the menfolk take over? At one point in this book, there's a team of three on a ship: two Lyons boys and another T-1 woman. Inexplicably, the Lyons are the ones taking a meeting with the admiral. The woman, who is otherwise no shrinking violet, has apparently stayed in their quarters because the admiral's tetchy about women. Hell no! What?! This is almost a throwaway element of the scene, but really snapped into sharp focus for me exactly how backseat the women in the Lyons family are to their male relations. And now it's apparently spreading to non-Lyons. Fantastic.It's not as noticeable in small bits, but if you read too much McCaffrey in one go, you notice the pattern of these women and it's really very weird. The Rowan was largely under Reidinger III's thumb, until Raven showed up and now he bosses her around. Damia never had a chance with Afra. The girl Lyons all seem to pale next to the boy Lyons as well. Overall, you will constantly see men talking their women down from some sort of emotional/overreacting precipice, but that action is NEVER reciprocated - because the men are generally cast as solid, dependable, logical people who don't need a steadying hand, unlike these crazy wimmens. Maybe McCaffrey wrenched female sci-fi characters out of their 1950s shell of total inaction, but she seems to have then mired her own characters in the 1980s. Permanently. (Which is possibly also the era where her view of homosexuality's hanging out.) Given that this book was written sometime in the late 80s, I guess that makes sense, but as a science fiction writer you'd think she'd be able to take a more futuristic view of gender relations.
I feel kind of bad for not liking this more since it was recommended by a good friend who really does love these books, but, I also know that each reading experience is a personal journey and one person's smooth footpath may be another's rocky road. I really enjoyed the first couple of books in this series but by the time I got to this one I was more than ready for it's final conclusion. "Lyon's Pride", to me, felt like a jumble of ideas and plot going in all different directions. It was difficult for me to follow the stories of the myriad of characters, and, probably because I'm not a fan of "war tales", I found the scenes of navy protocol aboard the spaceship tedious to say the least. The book as a whole was mostly dialog and almost no description other than what's provided via mental dialog between characters. I've read books with the opposite problem, too. There needs to be harmony between the two for an engaging story. But, more than that, it was the feeling of the book that turned me off more than anything. I just couldn't get into it no matter how much I wanted to and tried.
What do You think about Lyon's Pride (1994)?
McCaffrey should have stopped while she was ahead. This story was like the the never-ending space odessy, but even less interesting than it sounds. No love interest (which is always a mark in her pages), no character development. If she happened to stop on an interesting side story or character she quickly swapped to another story and never revisited the seed of hope she'd planted. I was so bored with about 30 pages left but felt it was worth skimming to see if anything would materialize.... The climax was completely forgettable.
—Christina
I shouldn't have tried to jump into the series in the middle, I know. That's a classic gaffe that I could have avoided, and as such, my opinion is skewed. I don't think, however, that's the problem with this book. There's just nothing here. This is the second McCaffrey book I've read, and the other one was long, long ago. However, I ended it with the same lack of interest that I did the other book. I got done with it, moved on, and will probably never think about the book again, except when somebody brings up Anne McCaffrey, and I puzzle over what anybody sees in her.It's not so much that the book is actively bad. Very rarely did I roll my eyes in exasperation, and I certainly never wanted to hurl the book across the room like I do with some titles. No, the book isn't bad, it's just that it fails to achieve anything good. It sits entrenched in the full boredom of mediocrity. The characters are flat. The world is not convincing. The plot is predictable, and mostly ripped off from Ender's Game, but lacks the sense of discovery and the moral quandaries that drive interest for that book and its sequels.If this had been submitted by anybody not named Anne McCaffrey, I have a hard time seeing it getting published. Avoid.
—Paul Schulzetenberg
This is a continuation of the previous book, focusing again on the children, and it was still interesting. I enjoy learning about the mrdini and the Hivers, as well as the general story. The person I was really interested in, and whose story I was looking forward to continuing really disappointed me, though.Zara seemed like someone who had some real character development going in the previous book, and who seemed to be going in a story direction I was interested in(getting into the mind of the Hivers). Unfortunately she seemed to have turned a complete 180 from the girl she was previously. And I guess I could understand that she matured but there wasn't any real telling of why not only her personality, but her opinions changed in such a major way. She also just felt a little bit jumpy in personalty in the book and it made me almost give the book a two.
—Kim
