Well, well, well…  This is a much better experience, this particular journey to Pern.  I’m finding Dragonsong to be a very different book from the previous one, in several ways.  A scant few hours since my last post, and I’ve readily ploughed through a hundred pages or more, and even had time to get a good night’s sleep in between chapters.

The principle reason?  Characters.  The previous book, ponderous ol’ Dragonquest, was event focused, with personalities to carry the story, but little depth of feeling to explore as a reader — all the action was action or problem-solving or narrative detailing the history or background of a particular aspect of story.  A lot of explaining, and not much exploration of the people involved.  The current volume, on the other hand, is character-based, focused as it is on Menolly, the rebellious passionate girl character I referred to in my previous entry.  Action happens to her, around her, because of her, but what the story is about is her experience of all of this.

The story runs concurrent with that of Dragonquest, overlapping in the storyline about the search for firelizard eggs, and sudden, off-schedule thread-fall.  But rather than focus on the overall picture, the planet wide (well, partial-planet) response to the threat of threadfall, this one takes a particular figure, far from the scene of action in the previous volume, a rather insignificant person in most ways, and views the situation through her limited experience of it.  Writing it out, it would seem to be a storyline very unlikely to work.

But this kind of story really does work, where a character unrecognized for her (or his) unique qualities none-the-less makes something of herself, or impacts her family/community/the world at large in an unexpected way.  Might be a small way, might just be carving out a self-reliant happy existance for herself — witness my love of good old Jane Eyre, an unlikely heroine if there ever was one.  And yet she perseveres, doggedly moving through what life offers – challenge or opportunity – and finally ends up doing alright for herself, in a truly hostile world. 

Menolly has something of the same dogged character, even if her author isn’t quite the artist that Bronte was.  And so, this is a story I actually want to read, and it was even a bit hard to tear myself away to update this journal.

Now, for some granola, a fresh cup of coffee, and more Dragonsong.