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unpetitcreux 's review for:

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
2.0

I apparently went into this novel with too many expectations. Having found this book in a list of "YA Best Feminist Science Fiction/Fantasy", I believed I would be reading a story about a strong, female protagonist. This was, unfortunately, not the case.

I was very frustrated for Lessa's character. For a majority of the book she instigates catastrophe after catastrophe and then is reprimanded by her older male 'mentor/lover?'. The reprimanding is so severe that she cries and shakes with fear when she does something of her own accord.

After a pretty cool beginning (where Lessa plots the destruction of an evil ruler), she ends up bonding with a dragon whose only purpose is to mate and make babies.... which becomes her main purpose. At the end of the story, her mentor/lover gives her permission to fight for the first time.

Apart from the novel's failure with female characters, I found the vocabulary unnecessarily complicated in the beginning, enough that I was having trouble understanding what was going on and who was who. I came to understand everything overtime, but by then I'd stopped trying to enjoy the story.

Conclusion, it's a shame I was directed to this novel through a feminist guise. I think the novel would have been much enjoyable if Lessa had not existed and we had just followed the male mentor's perspective throughout. I do not plan on reading the sequels.

(I would've given this book 2 stars, but I think I'm strongly biased against it purely because of the goodreads list.... so I cut it some slack).