Book 1: To Ride Pegasus

Well, I miscounted, so I didn’t get my 50 book challenge for last year, but oh well. I started early with finishing something at any rate.

And the year begins on a downward note because I really disliked this book. It’s basically three interconnected short stories about the founding of a Parapsychic Research Center, and the integration and acceptance of people with parapsychic gifts (or Talents) as actual members of society. It was written in 1973 and takes place at the very end of the century, and so obviously it’s quite dated as a reader coming to the book 30-some odd years later.

The story would have been much better told had someone else written it. Often, I felt that with the format McCaffrey used, she did a lot more telling than showing, which is something any good writer knows to avoid. And let’s not discuss the silly, vapid creatures that McCaffrey thinks are modern women. Really, let’s not. It will cause me to go into apoplexy. Also, it’s apparently not OK for the general public to be hypocritical assholes, but McCaffrey’s talents display as much hypocrisy and assholishness. I felt that some of McCaffrey’s villains in this book raised amazingly good points that McCaffrey chose to bluster over with self-righteous moralism rather than answer definitively, which disappointed me, because I’m one of those readers that generally likes to root for the heroes, not the villains.

Overall, give this one a pass. Read Zenna Henderson instead for a much better take on the paranormally psychic.