I've just started reading this as an interim book until I can start Ship Breaker, but I really like it so far. It has been many years since I have read Anne McCaffrey's works and now I remember why I loved her so much. This is an older collection of stories I picked up at an Oxfam in Reading. Two things caught my eye to buy it: 1) It is Anne McCaffrey and 2) It includes the short story "The Smallest Dragon Boy". #2 is significant because I read this story in elementary school and LOVED it but could never remember the name of the story.

I bought this book thinking that it would be all Pern stories, but I am incredibly glad that I was wrong. The first two stories of from McCaffrey's Rowan saga, which I have never before read. Getting introduced to the world through these stories was fantastic. I like the stories and the McCaffrey's style. This book may very well cause me to put Anne McCaffrey back at the top of my "to-read" list.


[UPDATE]

FINALLY! I'm finished. Good gods this took me a long time to get through, especially the last 10 pages. This collection of short stories ranges from stuff you could read in an elementary school class (The Smallest Dragon Boy) to soft-core porn...very soft admittedly, but there is lots of talk about sex and even a rape in one story (Honeymoon and The Thorns of Barevi, respectively). The stories were incredibly varied on most accounts, from topic to audience to length and writing quality. Mostly they shared a lack of exposition and/or explanation all around.

McCaffrey does a good job, however brief, introducing each of her stories, so if there is content you do not want to read (aka sex, etc) you can pretty much read her half page intros and just not read what you don't want. She also points out in a few of them how much the reader needs to have read the series that the story is based on. Lady in the Tower and A Meeting of Minds are based on the Damia/Children of Damia world, which I have never read. Honeymoon was what McCaffrey called an "unstory" because it relied entirely on knowledge of its series, The Ship Who Sang. The Damia stories were still interesting without the background knowledge; Honeymoon on the other hand slogged by (it was the last story) because you really HAVE to have a vested interest in the story and characters before hand to appreciate it. You can understand it without background, but if you're like me, you just don't care!

Over all, this is a pretty good overview of McCaffrey's writing, for better or for worse. There were some stories that I quite liked, especially the short ones. For some reason McCaffrey managed to evoke more interesting stories and plots in shorter spaces than the ones in longer ones. The shorter stories tended to also have an actual acceptable ending, whereas some of the longer ones left more questions than answers.

All in all, I'm glad to be done with this book, but also glad I read it. At times I may pick it up to reread one or two of the stories again, which is probably how this book is best enjoyed (not front to back).