Very disappointing, I have loved the original Pern series and re-read them several times. This was hard going, it has taken me nearly a year to complete reading it because it was so badly written as to be tedious. Predictable, un-engaging, and pointless, I stopped caring about characters I had previously loved and just wanted to reach the end in the hope it would add something to the Pern mythos, sadly the ending was as predictable and contived as the rest of the book. I won't be reading any further books in the series, I'd like to remember Pern as I originally encountered it