In the Kingdom of Dragons: Dwarf and Dragon: An Epic Fantasy Adventure Series by D L Burnett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I received a copy of this book via NetGalley for purposes of review.
I got not quite halfway through before I started skipping to see if it improved. As far as I could tell, though, it just went on in the same way: Unavoidable tragedy occurs. Main character feels bad about it, but there's nothing she can do. Repeat.
This doesn't make for a pleasant or interesting book. By halfway through, I want to see the main character of a book being a protagonist, taking decisive and at least partially effective action to improve matters and solve problems. I don't want to see more and more tragedies being piled up while she basically wrings her hands and feels helpless, despite being Fated, Cursed with Awesome and regarded as a goddess.
I think it was largely this that left me unengaged by the story. I honestly didn't care much what happened, because it was apparently going to be more of the same: the author rains down tragedy on passive characters, who suffer.
The editing has some small imperfections which I won't go into in detail. It's not bad for a small press. The style is no worse than most fantasy novelists produce, though it's no better. The worldbuilding is basic, and any time anything out of the ordinary happens it seems to be because of dragon blood, but it would have been adequate if the plot had consisted of more than a series of unfortunate events and the characters had any significant degree of agency.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment