A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

Children of the Dragon is a small-scale but otherwise standard story about three siblings and their dragon eggs; ends just as it starts to get interesting, that is, with the hatching. I wonder if a sequel was intended but never written? It certainly read that way.

Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons is an adorable, lighthearted entry in the Endless Quest (same principle as Choose Your Own Adventure), with rainbow dragons, a castle in the clouds, and a bratty princess.

My favorite Rose Estes book, and also my favorite Endless Quest (D&D-based, which I preferred to Choose Your Own Adventure), is still Circus of Fear, which has three totally different and super-fun tracks in which you run away to a fantasy circus and apprentice with 1) fantasy animal trainers, 2) freaks, 3) acrobats. Obviously 1 is best because blink dogs, pegasi, etc., but the other two, with very sympathetic “freaks” and an arrogant acrobat, are fun as well.

Any of you read Endless Quest and/or Choose Your Own Adventure? Which was your favorite, or most memorably bonkers? Anyone else stick slips of paper at choice points to help you backtrack when you ran out of fingers?

Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons (An Endless Quest Book, 6) (Pick A Path to Adventure)



Circus of Fear (An Endless Quest Book, 10)

In which Lady Isabella Trent, alt-Victorian dragon naturalist and explorer, goes to Africa.

Needless to say, she learns about dragons, but also about herself. She’s already grown up quite a bit at the start of the book, and grows more during it, becoming less blinkered, reckless, and self-centered. This allows for a wider and more complex view of both the individual people and the cultures she encounters, but loses some of the humor of the first book, which largely came from Isabella being monomaniacal.

The first half of the book is largely taken up with Isabella traveling and meeting people and learning about the region’s culture and politics— but not, alas, its dragons. That part was interesting on a worldbuilding level, but slow. I also really, really wanted more dragons.

About halfway through, the plot gains a lot of suspense, some dragons appear, and I got more involved with Isabella’s character growth. The second half read very quickly, and had some fun surprises. But while the dragons were satisfyingly different from the ones in the first book, they play a surprisingly small role— more quest object than actual presence. Given how fascinating they were in the first book, I definitely could have used more dragons in this one.

While a solid story in its own right, the book does feel like a lot of it is there to set up later events. I’m looking forward to Voyage of the Basilisk, which I suspect and hope will have more dragons.

A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent

The Tropic of Serpents: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons)

Voyage of the Basilisk: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons)

I promised bookelfe I would read this. Thanks! I think.

bookelfe reviewed a remarkable book, Pigs Don’t Fly, in which a rather unlikable heroine goes on a quest with six companions to make the mystical seven: a blind amnesiac knight, a horse princess, a cockney mutt, a Turtle of Love, a farm boy named Dickon, and The Wimperling, a winged pig who flies by farting. I am not making this up. I commend you to her hilarious review before you read mine, since this review is of the sequel, which she challenged me to read. Especially since I am about to spoil the end of Pigs Don’t Fly, since it motivates the entire action of this book.

Pigs Don’t Fly ends with Summer, the heroine, kissing her beloved pet flying farting pig. Poof! He turns into a dragon! Poof! He turns into a man! In a somewhat confusing scene, they have sex. Poof! He turns into a dragon!

He is a dragon who was under an enchantment which made him look like a pig. But since Summer kissed him three times as a pig, though he is now a dragon again, he is also now cursed to periodically turn into a man. He explains all this, then flies off to China, ditching Summer.

Master of Many Treasures picks up with Summer stalking her dragon-pig-not-boyfriend across the world. Occasionally she finds it necessary to justify herself to the reader:

But why fall in love with a dragon? Because I had loved the pig and the dragon wasn’t a dragon all the time.

Summer. Summer. You do not make falling in love with a dragon more acceptable by protesting that you actually fell in love with a pig!

But mostly, she doesn’t think about her dragon-pig not-boyfriend much at all. She’s too busy wandering around collecting plot coupons as she travels around, having basically everyone she meets see through her "boy" disguise and periodically conversing ethnically stereotyped characters speaking in comic dialect. This book is over-burdened with comic dialect. Her own companions include Growch the cockney mutt, a slave boy speaking an unknown language and broken English otherwise, and a developmentally disabled dancing bear. (Yes, really.)

Thankfully, three of Summer’s obligatory six companions do not speak in dialect: Ky-Lin, a magical Chinese stone chimera which she gets literally handed to her for no actual reason other than that the plot requires her to have it, Dickon, and the teeny dragon egg with which Summer was unknowingly impregnated.

Yes. She is pregnant with an egg. She keeps feeling sick in a pregnancy-signalling manner, but thinks that she can’t possibly be pregnant because it’s been a year since she had sex that one time. There are flashbacks to her sexcapade with the dragon-pig-dude, which are written in a manner probably meant to convey that it was all very unexpected and confusing, but really make it sound like the entire thing lasted about fifteen seconds. Which is entirely possible, all things considered.

With the help of Ky-Lin, Summer lays the egg through her belly button. I think. The scene is really vague. It’s possible that she lays it through some other orifice, but it’s then stuck into her belly button. It ends up stuck to her belly button, anyway.

Ky-Lin then helpfully explains that dragons are “bisexual.” He defines this as meaning that they are both male and female, and can fertilize themselves, so… I forget why this was relevant.

I don’t know why an egg that does not speak, telepathically communicate, or hatch counts as a companion, but it does. Mystic seven!

Ky-Lin spouts a lot of Buddhist philosophy which, based on its accuracy, I surmise was gleaned from the author vaguely remembering what she’d read in the Religions of the World chapter of some textbook when she was twelve. That being said, he does not speak in comic dialect and is the only character with any intelligence or common sense, so I cut him a lot of slack.

I barely remember Dickon from the first book, other than as a generic farm boy. In this book, he seems to be running for most unlikable character ever. He spends the entire book stalking Summer because he thinks she’s on a quest for treasure. He steals her stuff, drugs her, insults her and her companions, flees in a cowardly fashion whenever they’re endangered, and drinks all their water when they’re lost in the desert.

They have the same unbelievably annoying interaction something like six times in the book: Dickon shows up and harasses, vaguely threatens, robs, and/or leeches on Summer. She has an extremely bad feeling about him (I wonder why!) but even though she’s not afraid of him and she has a premonition that he will do something horrible, she always feels unable to tell him to get lost. He proceeds to harass, vaguely threaten, rob, and/or leech on Summer until he somehow gets ditched. She proceeds without him, until he turns up again, and the process repeats.

Summer is one of the stupidest protagonists I have ever encountered. Whenever someone acts suspicious or threatening, she assumes they can't possibly have bad intentions, and is amazed when they do. Whenever a clearly friendly person warns her of something, she is suspicious and ignores them. My very favorite instance of this was when Ky-Lin is leading her through a marsh full of quicksand and rotting corpses, and says, "The left path will dump you in quicksand. Take the right path."

Summer: "I'm tired of people bossing me!"

Summer: [Takes left path.]

Summer: [Is dumped into rotting corpse-filled quicksand.]

And then the true WTF begins. Even more WTF than the belly-button dragon egg.

( Read more... )

This all seems even more WTF than it would anyway because there has been no set-up that would make any of this make sense, thematically or any other way. The entire book is Summer's first person POV, except for the two epilogues.

I don't think I've ever read a book which was improved by two epilogues.

I think there’s a third book that explains what happened to the egg. I’ll pass.

Here There Be Dragonnes (Pigs Don't Fly omnibus). This is an omnibus which contains The Unlikely Ones, which has some problems but which I actually like. It's a very similar story to Pigs Don't Fly: girl who thinks she's ugly due to manipulation by an older woman guardian goes on a quest with one man and five animals, and discovers that she was beautiful all along. The difference is that it's written as a dreamy, poetic fairy-tale, and parts of it are quite beautiful and moving. Other parts show a witch having sex with a broomstick, in a short but understandably memorable scene. One of the heroes is a unicorn who is in love with an enchanted prince, so the human/mythical animal theme is also there. It's done a lot better and less ridiculously in The Unlikely Ones.

I liked this more while I was reading it than when I thought about it in retrospect. Given how much of the total text is set-up, it moves along at deceptively rapid-seeming clip.

This is a sequel to three different trilogies, but involves different characters and has lots of catch-up exposition, so it probably stands on its own.

After three trilogies of stuff happening, some dragons (previously extinct) have hatched in the Rain Wilds, a mysterious place with an acidic river. Humans who live there mutate into beings who vaguely resemble the extinct dragons, or maybe the extinct Elderlings.

The dragons, unfortunately, are weak and pathetic and can't fly, and are a financial drag on the locals as well as potentially dangerous to them. So the dragons, along with a bunch of misfits and troublemakers, are shipped off, along with a bluestocking scholar of dragon lore and her abusive husband's secretary (actually her husband's secret lover) and a jolly captain, ostensibly to seek the lost city of the dragons but really to get rid of them all in one fell swoop.

That is where the book ends. A sequel is forthcoming shortly.

There are a lot of potentially interesting ideas here, and as I said the book is very readable, but it suffers from bloat and pacing problems: all set up and no pay-off. This is a chronic problem for Hobb, though oddly enough is not a problem in any of her shorter novels under her real name, Megan Lindholm. Even more problematically, most of the characters are thoroughly unlikable, including the dragons, who take out their misery on everyone around them. It's seemingly meant as a take-down of the animal companion genre, but it's quite unpleasant to read. There's a reason why the animal companion genre appeals, and it's not because people like reading about sentient animals who hate you.

There are two gay characters, one of whom is a sociopathic abuser and rapist, and the other of whom, his secret lover, a pathetic loser who, in the very last pages, commits an absolutely horrifying act of violence for personal gain. Character development is what Hobb is all about so the loser will probably reform (the abuser probably won't) but without any non-evil gay characters and with the (probable) character development pushed into the next book, this book comes across as really homophobic.

That being said, there is a fantastic epistolatory subplot involving two of the few likable characters, a pair of carrier pigeon-keepers who append personal messages to their official ones. And I'm curious to see how it will all come out. My bet is that the well of silvery water in the lost city which the old dragons drank is what's needed to allow them to fly, and also what makes the river an acidic mutagen.

Dragon Keeper: Volume One of the Rain Wilds Chronicles