Dragon Strike

Closer to 1.5 Stars

I wanted to enjoy this book. The previous three in the series were likeable despite their flaws, and I hoped that I'd feel the same about Dragon Strike. Unfortunately, I didn't. Whereas the other books were still mostly entertaining, this one was a complete slog with the titular strike taking place in only the final handful of chapters.

The majority of this novel was just dry drudgery where even things which should have been exciting and interesting came across at a snail's pace with all the excitement of watching paint dry. Even the long-awaited meeting between the three dragon siblings was a disappointing and somewhat disgenuine (at least one of them felt completely out of character) affair which lasted three pages or less and then sputtered out into other things where they just coexisted. Where was the bitter fighting? What of the betrayal being avenged? No time for that, we have to bring in a Deus Ex of magical nature to propel the barely-there plot! Quite a disappointment, to say the least.

The main villain is also not particularly interesting. The concept itself is intriguing: an evil ruler who never shows her face, is rumoured to be immortal, and uses a creepy mask which she spins around on a stick to indicate whether she's happy or sad. The execution is laughably cringe-worthy and, toward the end, just plain confusing. I don't mind magic being added late-series to prove that the rumours of it existing were real; I'm always a big fan of magic in fantasy and have yet to find a video game in the genre where I don't immediately gravitate toward playing a mage. Even in Vampire: the Masquerade, I always gravitate toward the more mystical of clans. That's my jam! It just... was kind of molded jam that had been left in the fridge for too long, as far as the utilization in Dragon Strike is concerned.

It doesn't help that the chapters jump around from dragon to dragon in point of view, yet some chapters include more than one of the siblings' viewpoint. This is not an enjoyable storytelling method, though I'm not entirely sure how the author could have expressed all three stories without hopping around some. Perhaps I'd have found it slightly less jarring if the chapters were better-spaced and perhaps I'd have tolerated it better if so many of the best side characters (a disproportionate amount of which were female) didn't get killed off or horribly maimed for the sake of creating dramatic scenes. But alas, as with all the novels in the Age of Fire series, the last few chapters on the final few pages had to be packed full of action, intrigue, and things-actually-happening to make up for the slow climb up a boring hill. I will say that the hill didn't seem so boring in the other three books I read, but it was almost insufferable this time and reading Dragon Strike often felt like a chore.

I think the main difference may be in readability, though. Overall, it seems the same quality of storytelling with a far worse quality of editing went into this book. There are many typos, ranging from simple and forgivable to egregious. To name a few of the latter, there are some missing words and grammar issues which make comprehension difficult; a page where three sentences all begin with lowercase letters instead of uppercase (not as a stylistic thing, but at random); more than one instance where an incorrect character is named in a scene, one of which leads to a dragonelle being in two places at once; and even a couple factual errors such as Rainfall being referred to erroneously as Lada's father on one page then accurately as her grandfather within the next page or two. I also wonder about Ragwrist and Dsossa suddenly being married, because either I overlooked that development in Dragon Avenger or it's never properly explained. All I can recall is that Rainfall and Dsossa seemed very attached to one another in the second book, mentioned as having a “special understanding” with one another and touching hands together frequently. It definitely left me confused for a moment.

Overall, I'm mostly just glad this book is over. Were it not for already owning the next two books in the series and officially being 2/3 finished with the Age of Fire, I'd probably give up by now. I hear things only get worse in terms of writing quality and entertainment value, so I can't honestly say I look forward to knowing what happens next anymore. I just hope that it doesn't involve quite so much densely packed combat which doesn't leave room to picture it accurately in the imagination. And maybe the dragon names will get less... odd. It's hard to keep track of characters by name when there's no clue how to pronounce those names and they look more like alphabet soup; I basically just go by how the name looks and make up an internal voice sound to go with the names, which does draw me out of the experience quite a bit. And gets troublesome when it occurs that two characters have similar-looking names (same prefix, similar suffix, similar letters, etc). It gets tiring, for sure.

But it looks like I'm in this for the long haul, so onward to the next instalment I'll go soon... Wish me luck!