Review: Partridge Up a Pear Tree (and Dragons)

Partridge Up a Pear Tree (and Dragons) by Rachel Taylor Thompson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I grew up in a family where the women were capable and pragmatic, which isn't unusual in New Zealand. Accordingly, I prefer to read about women like that, and fortunately there are plenty of fictional heroines who are. Sasha, the protagonist of the first book of this series, for example.

Unfortunately, at least from my point of view, Joey Partridge, the protagonist of this book, is not that, even though she fixes things around the house (something that felt to me as if it had been tacked on to make her seem more competent). She's a big ball of crippling anxiety wrapped in a thick layer of codependency, and I personally found her trying to spend time with. She's surrounded by people who are incapable of listening to her, and treats this as normal and not a reason to, for example, refuse to go out with them. She has crying jags so severe as to be completely debilitating, and under stress she spills a desperate stream of consciousness that causes all kinds of trouble, not only for her but for the people around her. It got her previous boyfriend arrested by the Chinese state security forces, for example, which not only resulted in her family and his being thrown out of China but also broke their relationship completely.

He, of course, refuses to listen to her apologies. He's a brooding musician. At one point he describes her as the complete opposite of what we know her to be through her POV - fearless, happy, carefree - and then says she doesn't get him. Project much? (To be fair, when they were together she was able to be more like he describes, at least outwardly - but that in itself is a problem, in fact several problems.)

Her parents, and his, are part of a Canadian government department that researches dragons, called in to Newfoundland because of the events of the previous book. They move around a lot, researching dragons in various parts of the world; her parents are emotionally distant and impractical, and (you'll be surprised to learn) don't listen to her when she tries to tell them that she wants to pick her own college rather than the various ones they and several other family members have arranged for her.

For some reason - I suspect because otherwise she couldn't conceivably be the protagonist - the dragons have decided they like Joey, based on no acquaintance at all, and only she will do to help in finding out who is trying to do something initially vague to the incubating dragons that all of the fuss is about. She spends the first quarter of the book refusing the call, arguing (quite plausibly) that she's a poor choice for the role, engaging in extreme teenage angst, not being listened to by basically anyone, and starting up a new relationship that is obviously doomed (thus providing the classic YA love triangle), interspersed with flashbacks to the backstory in China.

She turns out to be surprisingly good at investigating, despite continuing high teen drama and a series of terrible choices and major wimp-outs on her part. Her handler/dragon liaison, Bob, says at one point that she's less incompetent than he'd expected, and honestly I felt the same. For me, it was the mystery and the investigation that kept me reading despite the teen angst - so I was somewhat frustrated when the resolution to the teen angst came before, and delayed, the resolution of the mystery plot, with no sense of urgency even though one was called for.

Other readers will no doubt enjoy the parts I didn't. The relationship and emotional dynamics are well developed and realistic, to be clear, so this isn't about the author's skill but the reviewer's taste.

Something else I enjoyed besides the investigation plot was the antics of the dragons, who are intelligent but in a way that doesn't completely map to human ways of thinking. They name themselves after dragons from fantasy literature, like Ramoth and Temeraire, which I also liked.

I had a pre-publication version for review via Netgalley, and one thing I did notice about it was that the editing was in a much better state than the previous book. I suspect a good copy editor has gone through and largely corrected the author's terrible overhyphenation habit, though they've missed a couple of cases where there's a hyphen between a verb and the pronoun which is its object (why would anyone do that?), and there are still one or two places where there's a hyphen between an adjective and the noun it's modifying. This includes "magical-creatures," which was everywhere in the first book, and the editor may have decided to keep it consistent (even though that means consistently wrong). There's also frequently a comma used after "of course" when it's just being used to agree with a previous statement, which is a common error encouraged by MS Word's inaccurate grammar checker. As always with books I get via Netgalley, there may be further editing to come after I see it and before it's published.

For me, it was a difficult-to-rate mix of strong storytelling, a character I didn't care for (though she does develop), and a cheeky shortcut by the author to justify why that character is even involved. Joey's character arc, from total emotional bomb site to able to stand up for herself and cope, came late and rapidly, which stretched my suspension of disbelief a little, though it is true that having to focus on the needs of others - in this case, the dragons - is the most likely thing to get someone in internal crisis to pull themselves together and break out of their downward spiral.

Overall, I'm putting it in the Bronze (lowest) tier of my annual recommendation list, because it wasn't quite the book I'd hoped for and didn't fit my taste well. If that hadn't been true, it would have won a place in Silver, since it's soundly written and has some insight into human relationships - just between humans I don't particularly care to read about. Your mileage is highly likely to vary.

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