Sunday, June 23, 2013

DRAGON FATE by E.E. Knight




Book Six of The Age of Fire
ROC
February 5th, 2013
978-0-451-46356-2
Fantasy
Paperback
Reviewed by Dawn (love2read28@gmail.com)
Obtained by Publisher



Three dragon siblings are the last of their kind and after harsh experiences; all three have struggled together and apart. Fighting has cost the dragon siblings much-kingdoms, friends and family, honor & glory as they finally remove themselves from the world in order to find peace. But peace is slow coming and the order that they established is falling fast without them there to enforce it. Dragons battle dragons as ancient magic awakens. Can these three siblings find a way to unite their lands and people to save themselves and all they love from destruction?

I have to admit DRAGON FATE is really, really hard to get into and I felt quite lost while reading it. I enjoy a good fantasy story. This series sounded like it had all the great aspects of a promising fantasy story. It had amazing world building, an intriguing premise and characters that showed promise but never delivered. The author does a really good job in creating a series where dragons rule and the world of humans are subjected to them. That being said, the issue I had was the plot mentioned things that happened in prior books many times and I was always scratching my head going “what?” This is clearly a series you can not read out of order and DRAGON FATE is one of those books that unless you read the first five books then you will be as confused as I was at times when I read this.

AuRon the Grey, intelligent yet wary; Wistala the Green, A lone female dragon warrior & RuGaard the Copper, ruthless, cunning and determined to be emperor. These three will find that their experiences apart as well as together will shape their futures in ways neither foresee. The one thing I saw while reading this was the author made mention of their flaws and strengths but never really got to the meat of the characters. The dragons alone were interesting to me but I felt I gained no knowledge of them except what was on the page. Why was Wistala a warrior? What happened to make AuRon so wary of others? The characteristics that intrigued me so are glossed over & left me confused even more.  I am not saying the characters are all one note characters, they were not. There were some great secondary characters that really interested me and wished the author spent a little more time on them. If these traits were covered in prior books a bit of backstory to introduce new readers would not have been amiss.

With DRAGON FATE, I felt a bit cheated I guess you can say by the lack of a strong story as well as the way this was written. I found some editing issues that should have been picked up before printing that took me out of the story as well as a few other issues that should have been taken care of before publication. I think I am going to try the first five books and see what the excitement was about the series and hope that this sixth book is just an anomaly in the series.

This is an objective review and not an endorsement
 

 

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