False Kings, True Gods: Dragon
Eva Mae Ramble
Price: $0.99
My Rating: Three stars (out of five)
Review:
I like a short read, so despite the other review complaining this book was too short, I picked this one up to give it a go. But ultimately, I have to agree with them. This book is the first of a series, and there is some promising world building in this one, but the entire story felt rushed, and almost breathless. We're hardly given the chance to know the characters for themselves. Instead, they all seem to be described from the points of view of the other characters. The characters whose names all blend together, because they're all so long. Everyone has a name, a surname, and a byname. Some even have more than one byname. While I had little trouble keeping them apart during reading, I cannot recall a single name even moments after reading the story.
But
the story itself does show some promise. There's an evil king (more on
him and what makes him evil) who's taken over the land like he's a
Lannister in King's Landing, his wife, whose husband he had previously
murdered, their daughter, and the boy their daughter is betrothed to.
When the boy runs away, the king stops everything to fetch him, lest he
get eaten by dragons. The only reason he fetches the boy is because
he's betrothed to the daughter. It was one of the elements that seemed
particularly rushed to me, if he's the evil king who's already taken
over everything, it seems odd that he'd go out of his way to fetch a boy
he didn't much care for to begin with. It seemed as if he'd wanted the
marriage, but the boy's kingdom is one that already fell, so the
marriage felt moot anyway. But since we never get to see anyone's
motivations without seeing them through someone else's eyes, it's
difficult to know what he's up to, or why. In fact, the only thing we
do know about him is that he raped his wife for twenty straight days
until she conceived their daughter. Rape as a way to show how evil
someone is has never been a trope that sat well with me to begin with,
but the flippancy in which it's discussed, even by the ten year old
daughter, was disturbing. And that was another thing. The daughter
didn't seem like she was ten, and seemed to flip between sides and
opinions as quickly as I flipped pages. I would have loved to see more
of what that was all about. It seemed like she might have been playing
some long game, but with the shortness of the story, it's difficult to
tell if that was the case, or if the author just lost the voice halfway
through. There's also a strangely Christian slant to this book, which
I'm not sure if it's intentional or not. But it didn't ping me as being
overtly Christian until the Lord's Prayer was said to Ra, which was
odd.
And there was the whole thing with the
dragons at the end. I picked this up entirely because it was a book
about dragons, and there it did deliver. A least in the final act. At
first I was confused about how many dragons there were, and had to read a
passage several times before just guessing that there were three. I
really wanted to see more of the boy and his dragon, and wanted to find
out more about the dragons. They seem intelligent in this author's
world, and I wanted to see how far that went. I kept wanting the dragon
to say something, or to give some definitive confirmation that it
understood the boy, but the story ended abruptly just as it started to
get truly interesting. Everything just suddenly wrapped up in a
strangely neat bow that I'm still not entirely sure I understand the
logic of. The rest of the series isn't out yet, and I can't say
if I will in the future. However saying that, I do appreciate that it
was written, and I love seeing European-ish fantasy with characters who
aren't white.
Check it out if you like
Princeless and dragons. It's a short read that definitely feels like
there could be a lot more behind it. Again, the premise is interesting, and it shows a lot of potential, but the rushed quality of it makes it feel like there's a lot missing to this story.
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