And it gets worse. Ms. M'Caffrey's prose has never been stellar, although it has usually been professional. I wish I could say the same of The Masterharper of Pern . The verbs are imprecise, as if the writer was desperately trying to find the right word and couldn't. Character names are even worse than usual.
Descriptions are, at best, journalistic and visual, and all too often absent.
It's a slight exaggeration. Say what you will about literary quality, Del Rey's copyediting is ordinarily quite good. Serious structural flaws have created all of the above problems in this book. The Masterharper of Pern shows the danger of rewriting events in series books in prequels, or from other characters' viewpoints. Yes, we can have unreliable narrators, different perceptions, etc.