Books like Dragondrums

Dear Mrs. McCaffrey,What were you thinking? You had done a brilliant job with the first two books in this "trilogy", so please do explain why you felt compelled to switch your focus from our beloved heroine Menolly to her rambunctious sidekick, Piemur? This is no trilogy. Do you think you can just skip ahead three years and make Menolly a peripheral player? Do you think that you can write a slow-moving, rather repetitive adventure story that lacks the resonance of the first two books in this trilogy, and we won't notice? We notice; and we are not happy.This story would be fine as a stand alone story. It still would not be a great story. Despite jumping across the map of your mythical Pern, this story goes virtually nowhere. Anticlimactic is an understatement. Piemur is not even close to being fleshed out as a character and, due to this, does not have enough weight as a driving force for this story.Why this final book jumps gears so completely is beyond me. Obviously, it left me rather frustrated. The story of Menolly was good, layered and exciting. As of book two, it was also nowhere near complete. In Dragondrums she is viewed from afar. She is understood only to the degree that Piemur understands her. This is at odds with the idea of a trilogy whose arc seemed to be the coming of age of a young girl.I would really like to know if Mrs. McCaffrey views these three books as a trilogy or if the publisher decided to lump them together and advertise them as one. I'm more inclined to believe the latter. Not just because I want to (though I do indeed want to), but because the sense of story in the first two books flowed with a confidence utterly lacking in this final one.