Reading dragon stories from Anne McCaffrey is a delight anytime, but especially so during the holidays. Her prose, always so smooth and humanely warm, shimmers in the holiday glow.

It is such a pleasure, then, to read again about Keevan, the smallest dragonboy, and Aramina, the girl who heard dragons, and then to meet new charmers like Tenna, the runner and Nian and Neru, the dragon-riding twins, in A Gift of Dragons, a book collecting four stories from McCaffrey's fabled world of Pern.

McCaffrey is an absolute master of characterization, but never at the slighting of plot. The pages here turn much too fast. It seems SO long since the last dragon novel. More, please, Ms. M, and soon.