Review: The Dragon Stone Conspiracy: A Strowlers Novel

The Dragon Stone Conspiracy: A Strowlers Novel by Amanda Cherry
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

If you follow my reviews, you probably know that protagonist agency is something I always look for in a book. In this book, I found hardly any.

For at least 80% of it, the main character makes no decisions except to do what people tell her and go where they send her; she usually has only one viable option, like the worst ever railroaded RPG. She faces no opposition, challenge, or test until about 85% of the way in; people keep transporting her places and giving her what she needs. She's passive, and what's more, the prologue reveals - before we even meet her - that she's a dupe and a pawn.

She does eventually face one challenge, but the gifts she's been showered with make the outcome a foregone conclusion, and there's little tension. She also does something else effective and important to the plot in the same scene, but completely by accident and without ever understanding (and without the author ever making clear, at least to me) why it happened.

This is a problem. Also a problem for me, in the pre-publication version I reviewed from Netgalley, is the fact that the author doesn't have a firm grip on capitalization or hyphenation, has a smaller vocabulary than she thinks she does, and commits several anachronisms (not to mention comma splices, a dangling modifier, and a mid-scene point-of-view switch). The state of the manuscript is such that it will take an excellent copy editor to bring it up to standard.

The setting is an open shared world, based on a rather obscure TV series from a couple of years ago which seems to only have released a few episodes and received little popular or critical acclaim. I haven't seen it, but the main character of this book apparently appears in several episodes of the series; this is by way of a prequel. The setting seems, judging by the book, to be a bland and generic urban fantasy world. There may be more to the character in the show, but the character in the book didn't have a lot of depth or development, mainly because she hardly ever made any decisions or faced any problems.

I have to say, I was expecting a lot more from the promising premise of "young woman fights Nazis with magic". Nothing is done particularly well, and a number of things are done badly, hence two stars.

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