Novice Dragoneer

A really puzzling and intriguing fantasy novel. This is a story that seems to throw a bunch of tropes and scramble them up, a weird combination of epic fantasy and English boarding school novel. I came in expecting a sunny, light YA romance and instead found a very well-written character who goes through a Robin Hobb-like series of unfortunate events that leave you wondering how she finds any time for happy moments.

It's really hard to pin down the target audience of this book. The frame story is probably a little too simple and plodding to be super convincing to adult readers - there's a lot of “this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens.” There's nothing explicitly wrong with that in literature, but the genre of adult fantasy usually demands a little more attention to the plot structure and pacing. On the other hand, many of the thematic issues of the book, particularly those revolving around power dynamics, are complicated and remain unresolved. It really seems like Knight was trying to write for everyone, and ended up writing a book that doesn't really work perfectly for most people.

I found this a very slow and unsatisfying start, but it sped up towards the end and I'll probably continue with the second book. I still wonder what this series is really aiming to do, but I enjoyed this enough to continue and hopefully book 2 will point the series in a clearer direction.

I kept putting this book down and coming back to it, hopeful I'd finish, but I'm calling it quits. My complaints here I think are more about the author, or maybe even just his writing style. I had been excited to read this one originally, but if I'm really fair and honest, I think the “dragons are big, talking, ridable pets” genre just isn't for me. So I don't want to be too unfair, since it's probably a fine story for someone who likes that genre - there are parts I really enjoyed. But ultimately, I don't like the main character, and I can't say I like this book.

Was hoping I'd eventually come around to this one, since this is my second attempt at this author, and I was immediately encouraged by the premise of this book being very different from another book of his, Dragon Champion. That one starts with male dragon hatchlings fighting to the death until there is only one survivor (the protag). It's totally normal for male siblings to fight to the death upon hatching, while their sisters cheer them on and pick sides. Later, after the dust has settled, the adult dragons start talking about how great “dragon marriage” is and become weirdly humanly-normal after that in terms of conversation, even discussing their wedding day and having family there and how funny your dad was when he did that thing at our wedding, oh ho ho. The female hatchlings sing about how one day they'll be grown and married to a male dragon, and it's literally the only thing they care about. The surviving male hatchling only cares about how strong he is, and this is reinforced by the parents. That's the point where I returned Dragon Champion to the library, so I don't know if it gets better. I'll just say that it was weirdly sexist and an incredibly boring take on dragons: “They're basically human, except they kill each other as infants!” ...Okay?

Moving onto this book. Novice Dragoneer starts with a female protagonist and attempts a coming-of-age story, which I'd hoped meant good things for the author's writing - maybe this one won't come off so weird since he's attempting it from a girl's perspective. Unfortunately, it had its own problems. Protag Ileth is accepted into the dragoneering academy, which is effectively a military fort that trains people to be dragon riders. Not everyone who is accepted ends up becoming riders, and some are just regulated off to grunt work for the rest of their employment at the fort; everyone starts at grunt work and has to be promoted in order to get closer to dragons, effectively, so the first half of the book has very little dragon “screen time”.

Ileth is a fish out of water in almost every scenario: she has a stutter, which is annoying to read but you have to accept it early on (I'm really on the fence about complaining about this, because I don't mind necessarily that she has a physical defect/disability/etc, but my reading comprehension is in the pits. The stutter makes it extra hard for me to read and I get stuck on her lines!); she's a runaway from an abusive home in the far north, so she doesn't quite fit in with most of her peers, most of whom are more local and/or come from rich families; she was originally encouraged to enlist in her childhood by a woman rider who is long since dead by the time she makes it there, so her one ally isn't there. So she has to really fight to earn her place - which isn't necessarily a problem, but it is a bit taxing when it's for everything. Everything she does, every scenario she's in, she has to demonstrate that she belongs there. Which... okay, fine. I guess. Tiring, but I guess. This should be encouraging because you want to root for the protagonist and their struggles, but there are points where I'm just frustrated at all the characters instead. The same girl who keeps getting sent back to the Master of Novices, over and over, is the only one who has anything interesting happen to her, ever. No one else does? Really? There's no rumors about anyone else, ever, at the dragon school? Whatever I guess. The thing that really exemplifies this is when she's scheduled to do her "first" dragon flying session, and there's a mixup and she's instead sent on a multi-day mail delivery to multiple territories - a diplomacy thing that could have ended poorly if she said the wrong thing at any time. Of course this happens to the one girl who always gets into trouble.

The BIG problems I have is actually with three main points: her rivalry with one of her superiors, the trouble she gets into at a party afterwards, and a specific promotion. And these boil down to the weird sexism I keep smelling with this author.

1) She has beef with her superior at one of her work stations, a man named Gorgatern or something. I'm fine with the whole beef, but I'm not fine with how it was resolved. She ends up in a duel with the man, which could potentially be fatal - IIRC they're not supposed to be fatal, but that's the risk you run with duels, and this man definitely will take advantage of that to ensure he'll kill her - he's an asshole. Cool, all good, high stakes, interesting storyline. She's a 15 year old girl and he's a 40+ man who's worked hard labor most of his life, so she doesn't stand a chance. But SHE challenged HIM so she must have some plan, right? Yeah, of course! Her strategy is... to strip naked. She never explains, to other characters or to the reader, at all how this is supposed to help her. (Also, it DOESN'T help her. Whatever she thought it was going to do, it didn't.) She's ashamed she even did it and avoids talking about it to other characters. So... why... did she do it? If there was even a moment where she has some internal dialog where she just thinks "maybe it'll distract him and I can get an upper hand," and she regrets it later, okay, fine. But there's none of that. We're just expected to understand her reasoning. And I don't. Me in this scenario, as a 15 year old, would have never had the thought to strip down to no protection in a duel and think that would help. I would have never challenged this man in the first place; the thought would never have crossed my mind, which is why I cannot fathom why it crossed hers, and the lack of reflection is baffling.

2) She wins the duel (he's disqualified for trying to kill her iirc) and the man is cast out of the academy. Okay cool. There's a party afterwards because no one liked Gorgatern. During the party, the kids have snuck some alcohol. Ileth, drunk, attempts to romance a boy. They're immediately caught and the fraternizing is against the rules, so she's brought to her superior who is on the cusp of kicking her out of the academy. I don't remember exactly how the scene goes down, but she basically proclaims her love for this boy and is basically willing to get thrown out of the academy to be with him. I understand that this is the alcohol talking, but becoming a dragon rider is this girl's one and only dream in life, and has been for years while under her father's abusive roof. And the problem I have is that... AGAIN, there is NO reflection, no internal monologue, of her regretting even having this thought later on. No self-questioning.

3) Dragon dancers. She becomes a sort of erotic dancer for the dragons, because dragons are relaxed by the smell of human womens' sweat. Aaaaand... I'm done. I tried really hard not to hate on this concept, because I like taking old fantasy tropes and giving them a twist (for example, the video game Hoard has a better take on the "dragons kidnap damsels" idea, which is "to ransom them off because dragons are obsessed with gold and kings will pay well for their daughters back"). But this one is just kinda gross. I'm sorry. I tried really hard to read this as "maybe it's not in a sexual way" but almost every context where the cultural perception (on the part of the humans) of it is discussed, it's basically on the lines of promiscuity. The characters have to justify to each other that it's not actually promiscuous because "just the dragons see it." I appreciate the attempt, but the execution didn't pan out, imo.

My complaints with Ileth mostly boil down to, her actions don't make sense a lot of the time, and we're just expected to understand or accept them. She makes strange decisions that could destroy her dragon riding career and there is no self-reflection, no internal monologue, no attempted reasoning to her peers that explains why. Readers are just expected to understand. And I do not. I don't get it. Some of the stuff she does is WILD and goes against her character, and there's NO point where she reflects on them and even asks herself why she did them. (If it's teen hormones, say that! That's fine if she's confused too! But why aren't you saying anything?) Which is why I say it comes across as “weirdly sexist;” it reads as an expectation that this is how girls are. Of course a young woman would conclude this is the only way she can win a fight; of course a teen girl would try to throw her life away for the first boy she ever kissed; of course female dragons are weaker and have reasons to live other than males, and therefore only care about how one day they'll fall in love and be dragon-married.

I won't claim the author himself is sexist. I don't know him, maybe he's genuinely trying. Just that these two stories were off-putting. I got much further in this one than I did in the previous one, but my complaints there still shone through here. So I won't be trying his work again.