The initial story about the Catteni preceded the books by many years. The Thorns of Barevi first appeared in 1970 (and is included in the collection Get Off the Unicorn, 1977). [1] A human female, Kristin Bjornsen, escapes slavery, but unlike others before her, she resourcefully evades capture for months. However, a Catteni gets injured nearby, and helping him betrays her fugitive existence. This story was modified and included as the beginning of the Freedom's Landing novel. McCaffrey's ludicrous obsession w/ the size of Catman's member. A male author spending equal time on the size of the female love interest's chest would get (rightfully) shouted down. Overall the romance had all the sophistication of a cheap bodice-ripper. Anne McCaffrey, one of the queens of science fiction, knows exactly how to give her public what it wants' - THE TIMES

Not so much. And initially, I couldn't put my finger on why not. Kris, as a heroine, is pretty awesome. She's everything we'd all like to hope/pretend we'd be if we too were captured, enslaved, and then dumped unceremoniously on a foreign planet -- she's smart, resourceful, self-sufficient, cool under pressure and unfazed by the sight of dreadful injuries, she's generous and considerate of others, she's physically strong, and brave, and to top all that off, she looks like a supermodel. And then I realized that's kind of the problem. McCaffrey's other heroines are also fairly awesome, but they're flawed. Lessa is awesome, with many of those same characteristics, but she has a hell of a temper, and, for the first while, at least, carries a chip on her shoulder bigger than she is about her family's ancestral holding. Killashandra is pretty awesome, but is a little impulsive, and as a result of the crystal singing, can be a bit of a bit, and suffers memory loss. The Rowan is pretty awesome, but is rather haughty and has phobias. Kris is... pretty much a Norse goddess of perfection. OK, not strictly true. She has some irritating quirks, like her constant correction of Zainal's grammar, and her irritating modesty. (Seriously. It bugs me to compare anything unfavourably to Twilight, but at least there, Stephenie Meyer managed to create a character who is obviously hot, and obviously attracting a lot of male attention, but who is believably unaware of that until pretty much actually beaten over the head with it. Mainly because she's stupidly oblivious, but whatever. Kris, on the other hand, is well aware of the male attention. She full-knowingly rebuffs the advances of at least three men, gets comments from others, and is generally presented as being perfectly aware of the effect she has on men. And yet later, we're expected to believe that she's "never thought of herself as sexy, or particularly attractive," or whatever the exact words are. Please.) Anyway, these aren't really character traits that make her more human; they're just little behaviours that make her annoying. And Zainal too, awesome as he is (who doesn't love a gentle giant?), is also pretty much just a caricature of perfection. It just makes their whole story less than engaging.

Success!

Furthermore, as someone who 99% of the time can't stand romantic subplots, McCaffrey has written one that I was absolutely giddy about. It's slow and real hot and respectful and it makes SENSE. Genuinely- I mean, I have never been able to sit through Rom Coms and I can't stand the shallow, adolescent, codependence that most fantasy and sci-fi novels include in their romantic subplots. This book though? I was basically whooping and hollering as the romance developed. Somehow Anne has written my dream boyfriend and he's a six and a half foot tall gray alien. No wonder I'm not dating anyone right now. Who could measure up? Kris Bjornsen is captured in Denver on her way to her college classes and wakes up on the primitive planet Barevi. Courageous and resourceful, she manages a single-woman escape from the Catteni and is living in the wilds of the planet when she comes to the aid of a Catteni soldier pursued by his own ranks. Recaptured together, they join forces with other slaves to outwit their captors and a hostile planetary environment.

I liked how very unbigoted Kris was, and how ready to defend Zainal and the other non-humans. I loved that she kept chastising herself for her horniness. I liked the pace of the romance as well , and found it very fitting that it didn’t take the forefront for a long time. The Catteni Series (also called the Freedom Series) is a tetralogy of science fiction novels by American writer Anne McCaffrey. In this universe, humans are slaves of aliens, the humanoid Catteni. Woven through all four of the books are details of the relationship between Kristin Bjornsen, a former slave, and Zainal, a renegade Catteni. As the survivors unite together, they soon learn that the planet that their masters once thought was empty is full of dangers, including mechanical farmers that harvest planets for an alien species technically advanced than any other species in the galaxy. Kris and Zainal have been working hard, both as a couple and at community help when things get wild again. They have made runs to Brevari to get supplies, being able to slip out of the bubble the farmers put up to protect the people on the planet they named Botany. But one of the things that Zainal wants to do is rescue his sons from his home planet, where he knows they are being mistreated. Artificial insemination? It was mentioned in an earlier book but for some reason was dismissed as an option.To me, it would have made a LOT more sense to start the story earlier, say with her abduction from Earth, struggle to survive as a slave, struggle to survive as an escaped slave, maybe give me some reason to sort of like the rapey love interest. Boom. There you go. Novel. Not very Anne McCaffrey but why does anyone, even Anne McCaffrey, have to write like ANNE MCMFINGCAFFREY EV-ER-Y time? Another thing I find interesting is the author's way of getting the heroine pregnant, since she is not able to reproduce with her partner. What aggravates me most is that there's a story in there, but she's not brave enough to tell that story. I see so much of what could be done with the setting merely by showing us the episodes that she tells us about. Show us the story, Anne. Show us. That's the interesting bit. I enjoyed the Dragonriders of Pern series (until her son took over) when I was a young adult, but I haven't read Anne McCaffrey since then. I don't know if this is dated or my tastes have changed or what, but this seemed a little .... off. This is a survivalist story, about a group of humans and aliens working together to establish civilization. They fight natives, not in the form of primitive aliens, but in the form of mechanized robots that seem to farm the planet on autopilot. Who owns these machines? They don't know, but they'd love to find out.