Nerilka’s Story, Anne McCaffrey

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language: English
country: USA
year: 1986
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: Dragonriders of Pern, #8
dates read: 23.9.21, 24.8.24-25.8.24

Anne McCaffrey’s Nerilka’s Story is the midpoint of the Pern novels, a companion to Moreta, following Nerilka/Rill, a side character who appears in a few scenes in Moreta.

Nerilka is an older daughter of the Lord Holder of Fort Hold, strong-willed but — we are repeatedly told — not particularly attractive, and increasingly frustrated with her father and her position in the Hold. she would rather be anywhere else and do anything else. fortunately for her, a continental pandemic comes along and, to her chagrin, more than gives her things to do: preparing medicine, helping maintain the Hold, and ultimately — when her father immediately moves his mistress in after finding out that his wife has died of the plague at another Hold — running away to be a kind of ad hoc Healer. she makes her way to Ruatha Hold, where she becomes entangled with the life of Alessan, one of the main characters of Moreta. predictably, by the end of the novel they marry.

the bulk of the book is fine. it doesn’t really add much to Moreta — it’s rather a let-down, honestly. Nerilka’s narration is brisk and reasonably engaging (in part because she’s more opinionated than she perhaps would admit), but the novel rather glosses over most of the actual events that made Moreta interesting — including the plague, which Nerilka only really encounters during a brief section (just a few pages) while helping at one of the internment camps at Fort. mainly we hear about the three days she spends helping Alessan and company prepare the animal vaccination serum, at the end of which Moreta dies and Nerilka convinces herself she’s in love with Alessan and gets him to agree to marry her in order to preserve his bloodline before he dies of his overwhelming grief. fortunately, Alessan is able to come to some terms with Moreta’s death, and they settle into a happy marriage. it is, in this respect, deeply predictable and as a result not particularly interesting.

its main function narratively seems to be addressing, essentially, two small discrepancies between Moreta and the accounts of “The Ballad of Moreta’s Ride” that we get in Dragonflight and Dragonsinger. which, whatever, but it didn’t ever feel like it needed to be a full book.

the final section is definitely the worst. the romance is back to the old formula (she wants him, she doesn’t want him, she wants him, she doesn’t want him, until they inevitably have sex), with some added layers of ???, including the offhand implication that Capiam and Desdra are a couple now? what? it is, ultimately, the story of Nerilka, who at the beginning of the novel wants desperately to escape Fort Hold and find a new life of her own, free of her obligations to her family, deciding that instead what she most wants is to become a tradwife. we are explicitly told that she is “happiest pregnant” (and conveniently “never suffer[s] as others have from being in that condition”). it’s very bad!

the one, tantalizing saving grace of the book is that Nerilka is drawn to Ruatha by the memory of her foster-sister Suriana, Alessan’s first wife, with whom it quickly becomes clear that — whether McCaffrey recognized this when she was writing or not — Nerilka was deeply in love. her interactions with women throughout the novel are very gay; she wistfully regrets that Moreta’s last glance over her shoulder to Alessan wasn’t Moreta looking at her, that the way Oklina’s eyes are shining is because of B’lerion and not because of her. it’s very touching, except that then she ends up as a tradwife. yikes!

moods: reflective


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