Dragon Champion

Dragon Champion by E.E. Knight is the first book in the Age of Fire sequence. I'd seen Knight by an author I'm a fan of so I decided to give him a read. Knight is more known for his pulpy Vampire Earth books, but as I'm a fan of high fantasy I went with his new series instead.

Dragon Champion has all the staples of High Fantasy going for it. It has elves, dwarves, and of course dragons. It even has a dragon on the cover. ( Beautifully drawn by Paul Youll.) The protagonist is an orphan. Sounds cliche right? Well it certainly could be, but Knight take the cliche and turns it around. Perhaps not 180 degrees, but at least a sharp 90.

The orphan protagonist is Auron, a rare scaleless gray dragon, and the story is told entirely from his viewpoint. It follows his life from an emerging hatchling to a full fledged dragon. Along the way he experiences loss, finds new friends, makes new enemies, and discovers what it is to truly be a dragon.

The world building is very good. Knight sets sown several varied histories of the world, differing of course on which race is recording them. The creation mythologies are well layed out. He also does a fine job with characterization. For the most part his characters are very believable. The book sets a strong pace, but also gives the reader time to rest and reflect.

All in all Knight does very well in this endeavor. He takes what could be a tired concept and injects it with new life. I very much enjoyed Dragon Champion and will be looking to pick up the soon to be released follow up Dragon Avenger.

7.5 out of 10

you can purchase this book at
Clarkesworld
or
Amazon.com

New Look

I got tired of the dark look so I decided to change template to go along with the switch to Beta.

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Tripping to Somewhere

Life is going nowhere fast... until the night some freak wanders into the convenience store where Sam and Gilly are hanging out. He lets them in on a secret; The Witches'Carnival is nearby. If they travel fast, they might catch it.

Tripping to Somewhere is the debut novel by Kristopher Reisz. It was described to me as a cross between Gaiman and Kerouac. While that may be what the author was aiming for, I think its too lofty of a goal for his first book.

The story follows Gilly and Sam a pair of angst filled teenage girls as they run away from home to join the fabled Witches' Carnival.
Their chase takes them on a trip across not only the country, but across the ocean. Along the way they run the gambit of sex, drugs, rock & roll, and even throw in a few felonies for good measure. They find the Carnival, but the cost to join in might just be too much to pay.

Tripping was published by Simon Pulse which is an imprint of Simon and Schuster generally aimed at younger readers. I think I was outside the key demographic audience for this book. While I found it fairly enjoyable, and a fun easy read, It did nothing to particularly grab me. Perhaps I'm just not capable of empathizing with an angst filled teenage lesbian, but the characters did not make me care about them. The situations they got into and out of seemed too unrealistic for me, even in a fantasy novel.

All in all, while I don't think its a great novel, I think that it will appeal to many teens, who are looking to live vicariously through the protagonists. As I said it was a fun read despite the flaws.

6 out of 10

One More for the Road

One More for the Road is a short story collection by Ray Bradbury. It consists of 24 unrelated stories, 17 of which had never been published before. Bradbury is a master of the genre, and this book contains some really nice stories. It also contained some that fell very flat. A few of the stories grabbed my, and several others were very interesting in concept, but just weren't my style. Unfortunately a lot of the stories didn't meet either of those criteria for me.

The Nineteenth was my favorite. It was a moving story of a man mysteriously encountering he deceased father on a golf course looking for lost balls.

The Dragon Danced at Midnight was a furiously paced story of the rise of a filmmaker via the lucky accident of a drunken projectionist showing the reels of his film out of order.

Autumn Afternoon was a sad tale, of an old woman and her young niece. The niece saves calendar pages as remembrances. When cleaning out her attic the lady finds a stack of her own calendar pages from her youth, but she can't recall why she saved them.

For the rest the tales were mostly forgettable. Not bad really, just not remarkable. If you are a fan of Bradbury, feel free to give this a shot. You may like it more than I did. If you are new to the man, I'd stick with Fahrenheit 451 or the Martian Chronicles.

5 out of 10