Rating: 
Summary: Double Disappointment
Review: As a longtime fan of Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, I was bitterly disappointed by Freedom's Landing. Despite a strong female protagonist and an intriging romantic interest, the book is mediocre. Worse than that, it's offensive. It's a mediocre example of science fiction because of the cardboard characterization of most of the cast, the predictability of the plot, and the total lack of originality of ideas. Nothing surprises, nothing intrigues, nothing challenges. In over 300 pages, the only "suspense" was wondering how long it would take the heroine to bed the hero. The book is also very offensive due to its racial and ethnic stereotyping. The Catteni have supposedly captured the inhabitants of cities all around Earth--yet all the captives turn out to be white folks (Australians, Norwegians, Russians, etc.). Oh, yes, one American is described as "dark-skinned"; he's a cook who says things like "I wouldn't stand on no ceremony was I you." (Gee, did a character from Amos & Andy wander by mistake into her book?) The white folks are also described in stereotypical ways, of course; the Australians are blunt & outdoorsy, the Norwegians blond & athletic, the Doyle brothers, "being Irish", "seemed to get along with anyone". And then there's the description of the "bad guy" conquerors, the Catteni: "brutish coarse features" and "thick blubbery lips"--except the single good Catteni, who of course has "a straight almost patrician nose" and "a wide well-shaped mouth". In other words, he looks like the white folks; no wonder our heroine falls in love with him! Anne McCaffrey has never written science fiction of the the highest quality, but she has sunk to a new low with this series.
Rating: 
Summary: Another Great McCaffrey book!
Review: This is the start of another great McCaffrey series. It has great characters and a great plot, with detailed landscapes. I enjoyed this book immensely and I think you will too! Read this book, it is a great book by Anne McCaffrey!
Rating: 
Summary: unique
Review: I have read all of Anne McCaffrey's books and I think that the Freedom Series is one of her best. I love the originality that Anne McCaffrey exhibits in her books. These books are based on an American that gets taken along with many others from Earth, by an alien race that is trying to take over. She is turned into a slave on a distant planet, but escapes into the wilderness on the planet. She lives there for months before she has contact with Zainal, an alien of the race that has captured her. Only it is not what she would have suspected becuase he was being chased by other people of his race, Catteni, that were trying to kill him. She helped him escape from them but when she trys to return him into the city they are caught. They are dropped on a planet with many humans and some other aliens to colonize the planet for the Catteni. And that is the beggining of their adventure to try and escape from the Catteni dominance. I love these books but that is me, and not everybodys tastes are the same.
Rating:
Summary: A Fun Read
Review: Now, to qualify my review, I will first say that besides Crystal Singer (which I hated vehemently), this is the only other Anne McCaffrey book I've read. So, I'm not the zealous fan disappointed by a book lacking in customary quality, I'm more neutral - and in fact, I may be quite the opposite, having quite a negative opinion of McCaffrey's writing after reading Crystal Singer.
I picked up Freedom's Landing because the plot interested me. Humans shipped as slaves by an alien race, forced to colonize an unknown planet - that was the sort of sf I could stomach. The book's premise is interesting, but as others have commented, the plot in Freedom's Landing is lacking and inconsistent at times. The action was a bit trite and predictable, and didn't really draw you into what was going on. This is certainly not a book for those who read for an adventurous plot or action - this is definitely more character oriented. The focus in Freedom's Landing is not the advancement of a plot, but the introduction of the reader to important characters, the growth and romance of the main character, Kris. And that is where this book wins.
Kris is a strong character - a whole person and someone I found I could relate to and like. She is totally fleshed out in the book and you really enjoy following her journey in the book. Unlike many sf or fantasy books, her growing love of another character [sorry, won't spoil for others] is very believable and realistic. She's the sort of character that you can root for - and that's why this book is worth reading. The book is a great character novel - something unusual in the traditionally action/plot-oriented fantasy or sf,which is why many people may not like this book. But if you're interested in getting to know a bunch of interesting characters and follow their development, then this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: needs an intelligent editor
Review: ARGH! Seldom has a series of books made me more angry than the 'Freedom' series which I just finished. McCaffrey is as imaginative as ever, and these books have a fairly interesting plot... but the editing is atrocious. Ace-Putnam (Putnam-Penguin) should be run out of business for the total lack of editing expertise its editors demonstrated with these books. It's as if McCaffrey wrote the first draft, went back in and wrote some notes in the margins of the text, and then handed it over to the printers. Errors in logic, grammar, spelling, and even plot abound. For instance: the character Coo, who in the first book is Deski, in the second is referred to as Rugarian. The main character, Kris, faints "for the first time in her life" two or three times. Grammar errors are often editing snafu's where something was cut out and the sentence never restructured to account for the change. Sentence fragments abound. (Or should I say, "Sentence fragments."?) Oh, and did I mention the SCIENCE part of this so-called science fiction is ridiculous? Someone should tell Ms. McCaffrey that people - even aliens - do breathe through their mouths as well as their noses; at one point she has people using noseplugs alone to keep from breathing noxious fumes. Luckily the plot is so basically simple and the main points are repeated so often that even with all these problems the books are a fast read... though not fast enough for me. I am never reading a McCaffrey book again! Give me great writers like Dan Simmons, Kim Stanley Robinson, David Brin, and Neal Stephenson - after reading this trilogy and the last few installments of her Dragonrider series (which I loved) I'm now conviced that Anne McCaffrey has moved well past her prime.
Rating: 
Summary: Better than average for McCaffrey nowadays...
Review: Freedom's Landing is a workable SF/fantasy/survival book with interesting characters, a fairly decent plot, and a good SF environment. Whether this lasts into the rest of the 'Freedom' books is another question! Since Ms. McCaffrey lost her editor (sometime around the nth Pern book), she seems to be doing her best writing when it's the first book in a series. This is an example of that. She has to introduce us to lots of characters, multiple alien races, an entire planet, and all kinds of technologies so she manages to avoid being as repetitious and tangential as she usually is nowadays. Her use of vernacular English is as usual laughable and the fact that she's been leaning more towards 'bodice ripper' romance than SF lately is pretty evident in the first chapter, but since I only paid [dollar amount] for it I can live with it. The rest of the books, however, I'm getting from the library as I refuse to pay list price for any McCaffrey book anymore. Too many disappointments!
Rating:
Summary: Freedoms Landing
Review: A wonderful start to a good series. What you like is your own personal choice and how you like stories to play out in your head.
So as for me I liked this book. If you just want a fun read of Earthly destruction and humans being put into slavery. Have fun! I am.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't even bother...
Review: After reading some of the reviews, I had to add my two cents. Like another reader, I checked out the first three from the library. Like an idiot, I proceeded to read all three. For those of you concerned about editing in the first book, it gets even worse as the series continues. The characterization doesn't even rise to two-dimensional, let alone free-standing, dynamic development. McCaffrey's attempts to use the slang from the "other" English-speaking parts of the world are at times insulting, at others hysterically off-base. As for plot, huh? McCaffrey takes a a solid, original idea and turns it into something no self-respecting pulp writer would have used. Finally, McCaffrey's chauvinism, masquerading as Old World British condescension, jarred constantly. Basically, don't even bother....
Rating:
Summary: Incredible!
Review: The book, though it was fairly light, was a wonderful beginning to a trilogy. It had a fairly good plot and also many twists and turns that weren't completely expected.
Rating:
Summary: poorly written, one-dimensional characters, bad sci-fi
Review: A. McCaffrey is not an author whose books you should automatically purchase. Sometimes she can write well (Restoree, The Ship Who Sang, The Ring of Fear), but most of the time she seems to be as alien to the English language as the Catteni. Needing a sci-fi fix, I bought the Crystal Singer series and this book. What horrible, horrible fiction. In all of them, they start out good,but soon McC. alienates her readers with underdeveloped, one-dimensional characters and innane dialogue ("Hey, look at that big bird,Zainal." "Yep, that is a big bird, even a Catteni like me think so.").I skimmed most of this book just to follow the plot. Kris (who I unfortunately share a name with) is a [fool]. Here she is, dumped down in this alien world, Earth taken over by aliens, and there is absolutely very little reaction from her about this. No real grief, etc. It is all very commonplace to her. The sex scene with Kris and Zainal was lackluster. My advice to McC.: if you can't write a good one, don't write one that is really, really bad. Leave it out! Fade to black! I am not even going to read the rest of the series because the characters are so boring that I don't care if they overthrow the Catteni/Esoi, survive a visit from the unknown aliens who "own" the planet where they are now, or build a Disneyland there. They seem to be able to do everything else (I find that unrealistic too--wouldn't there be some fighting, disorganization, confusion? Just because Mitford is military extraordinaire doesn't mean he can conquer all negative human qualities). My advice: Don't buy or even borrow this book to read. It is not worth the time. Go for some good sci-fi in which the authors take the time to develop realistic, interesting characters in well-defined alien worlds--not something that is not called Earth, but gee, looks a lot like it (aside from the scavenger things). (I also didn't like how eager they were to always kill the life forms there--whether they needed to eat or not. It was like NRA let loose in Wild Kingdom. Didn't they have any vegetarians? Besides, after awhile the rocksquats or whatever would have been more wary of the humans/aliens and less easy to find/kill.)Horrible book!!!! (the Crystal singer series was just as bad.)
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