Warning, great big spoilers.
Even though I graduated *ahem,mumble,cough* years ago, I still get a flood of memories around back-to-school season. Many are positive, some less so. By far the best memories involve Anne McCaffrey’s Harper Hall trilogy; my sixth-grade English teacher read the first two books out loud to our class over the course of most of the school year.
First printed in the 1970’s, Dragonsong and Dragonsinger tells the story of Menolly, a lonely teenager living a repressed life in a fishing village that doesn’t have any patience for girls who want to be musicians. Friendless and miserable, she runs away and purely by accident becomes the owner of nine fire-lizards: miniature telepathic dragons who are loyal to her and her alone. Imagine being a somewhat awkward middle-schooler and getting to hear a story like that. If you’ve ever wondered why my twitter and Deviantart names both have the word “dragon” in them, this would be the reason why.
Not to say that these books are all rainbows and magic; a lot of what Menolly goes through is pretty harrowing stuff. In Dragonsong, Menolly’s parents put up with her musical talent only while their old Harper, Petrion, was still alive. Once Petrion dies it’s made clear to her that a female musician is an embarrassment, and under no circumstances is she to sing or play solo when anyone can hear. She’s not allowed to even hint to anyone outside her village about her musical talent. Her father beats her savagely for accidentally playing a few bars of a song she composed, and her mother arranges for a cut on Menolly’s hand to become infected to try to destroy her ability to play a musical instrument. All of this makes it that much more satisfying when she finally runs away to live with her new dragon-friends in a cave by the sea.
If you’ve read any of McCaffrey’s other Pern novels you’ll know that living out on your own is no walk in the park, what with having to watch out for “Thread”, a mysterious organism that drops from the sky and burns/eats anything it touches. The chapters where Menolly lives on her own are some of my favorites in the book, simply because I loved seeing the social misfit being so resourceful: making a comfortable shelter away from Thread, finding food for herself and her dragons, even making herself a panpipe so she can play music again, accompanied by a chorus of tiny dragons who have a talent for singing that no one’s ever discovered before.
Getting caught out in an unexpected Threadfall gets Menolly rescued (I can’t even tell you how much I loved that particular scene) and taken to Benden Weyr, home of many of the full-sized dragons and their riders who keep Pern safe by battling Threadfall in mid-air. After some misunderstandings and further awkwardness from Menolly, who still can’t let herself reveal her musical talents or tell anyone who she really is, the book ends with her being flown by dragon to the Harper Hall, finally able to fulfill her dreams of being a musician. And if I had any quibbles with the ending, it’s that we never do get a confrontation with Menolly’s parents, or see their reaction to the revelation that their embarrassment of a daughter is the long sought-after musical genius that Petrion mentioned but never revealed, and now she has nine beautiful dragons and she’s going to be a musician’s apprentice and be admired and happy so THERE.
Dragonsinger has Menolly going through a different kind of peril. You know all those things you imagine people say behind your back, about the fact that you’re not as good as you thought, or maybe that you have more than you deserve, or even being where you are is a great big mistake and sooner or later everyone will see through all your kissing-up and who do you think you ARE, anyway? (Just me? Okay then…) Well Menolly gets to hear all of that and more. Having musical talent doesn’t protect her from the fact that female musicians at the Harper Hall are usually highborn ladies learning to play the lute as something to do other than embroidery. And fire-lizards are still pets reserved mostly for the wealthy, so having nine of the beasts makes her the target of a lot of envy. Menolly doesn’t have any of the social graces that anyone who didn’t grow up in a hardworking fishing village would learn, and she still isn’t confident enough about her musical talents to shake off the worse criticisms, or do anything that would look like showing off. For me, reading some of the nasty confrontations she gets into was tough, especially during that age where life seems like nothing but a series of uncomfortable situations already. Sometimes I wondered why Menolly didn’t just throw in the towel and run off to her cave again; the possibility of getting eaten by Thread seems pretty tame compared to a public dressing-down for daring to hang your cloak out the window to dry.
But Menolly doesn’t run away. She keeps finding moments of happiness with her music, and her dragons, and one by one she makes friends with people who have the sense to realize that Menolly is first and foremost a nice person. She eventually proves that she’s brave enough to stand up for herself and others when it really counts, something which goes all the way back to the day she saved a nest of hatching dragons and earned herself nine friends because of it. This is also one of the few young adult books I can think of where there’s no love-triangle, no unrequited crush driving character development. In in the end it’s her strength of character, awkwardness and all, and her own talent that saves the day. Middle school was the perfect time to have Menolly and the rest of Anne McCaffrey’s books introduced to me, but I’ve reread them many, many times, and I think they’d be just as enjoyable for adults too. (Go ahead and stop with All the Weyrs of Pern though; that’s pretty much the high-water mark for the series.)
Oh, and that English teacher? After that year Mrs. Teahan went on to read us Dragondrums, The Hobbit, and a good portion of The Fellowship of the Rings before the end of seventh grade. My middle-school English teacher was amazing.
(Elizabeth Malczynski created the gorgeous cover art, if you were curious.)