The Crystal Singer by Anne McCaffrey

Killishandra Ree wanted to be an operatic star. She'd trained for it all her life - trained hard. But, at the very last stage before she can tour the Known Universe, her rating is dropped because her voice just isn't perfect, despite the fact she has perfect pitch - the ability to perfectly reproduce  a tone from memory.

She's depressed and decides to run away and hide. Then she meets a member of the Heptite Guild, an elusive, selective Guild responsible for mining Crystal on an isolated and quarantined world. Crystal that is responsible for most energy utilization in the universe, and, most importantly, enables instantaneous communications across the vast distances of interstellar space. As a result of her meeting, and the subsequent collapse of the Guild member, she returns with him to Ballybran, the only world on which Crystal is found. There she learns that, in order to be a Miner in the Guild, one must have perfect pitch. Her interest is piqued, but there is a secret cost for the fame and glory of Crystal mining, which the Guild militantly keeps to themselves. Killishandra finds the mystery and the promise inescapable and joins the Guild. And that's just the beginning...

Mrs. McCaffrey is quite the visionary storyteller, as her almost unbelievable amount of work will attest to. In this, one of her lesser known tales, it really shines. This is probably my favorite McCaffrey story, edging out the Pern series for character identification on my part. I LIKE Killishandra, despite, or maybe because of, her rough edges. She is a diva in every sense of the word. She is smart, witty, passionate, devoted to her craft, demanding, selfish and unreasonable. I LOVE that!

Unfortunately, I have always found Mrs. McCaffrey a bit juvenile in her language and development, and that hasn't changed in this book. Mrs. McCaffrey simply tells her story with very little lyrical or visual description. Its hard to draw mental pictures of her characters or worlds. They come off a bit two-dimensional. The Crystal Singer, while a superb adventure story, simply will never be great literature, in any genre.

But despite that, The Crystal Singer is a fun read and will stay with the reader for a long time. It manages to evoke all the right emotional responses in all the right places, and its almost swash-buckling in it's tone and meter. Its a great book to curl up with on a summer evening when there's nothing but re-runs on and just read for the pure, decadent joy of reading.