I picked up the first Dragonlands book a while back because dragons. I love dragons. I’m one of those people who keeps piling on books faster than I can read them. Part of what I’m doing this year is trying not to buy too many new books so I can get these other books read.
It’s been a minute since I read an adult fantasy like this. It had a romantic subplot, which is pretty typical of any genre, but it’s not romance. Not like what I’ve been writing with The Lost Princess of Howling Sky, so it’s a bit of a different flavor.
Reading different genres and subgenres is fun. It’s worth noting their differences, and it gets your brain going. It takes you out of your comfort zone, maybe. There are many ways to tell a story. Is the focus on plot or characters? Both? Will it have a happily ever after? What can I expect?
In romance, we expect happily ever afters. Not necessarily true with fantasy.
A lot of people die in Hidden. It feels appropriate to the setting. This book sets up a war, and war means death. The characters we follow are from a little town surrounded by a dangerous fog. Anyone who leaves never come back.
I found the setting intriguing. This first book doesn’t show us a lot of the world, but we get a pretty decent picture of it by the end. I want to know more about the dragonlords. Call it the shifter addict in me, but dragons literally rule the lands, or people who can shift into them anyway. I’m for that. They’re brutal and fierce and animalistic.
I love seeing different takes on these mythical creatures. Dragons are evergreen.
I didn’t have any close attachments to the characters. A lot of characters die quickly after they are introduced. This book runs more on plot, in my opinion. It kept me reading with just enough mystery, short chapters, and no lingering details. Those three things drove the story for me. With that in mind, I’m going to analyze the mechanics of those more while reading other books.
I don’t know about you, but I often have a hard time focusing. Blame society and all of the in-your-face media we have or something else, but it’s true. A reader’s time is valuable, so how does an author capture that? How do readers decide if they’re going to pick up the next book? Obviously, the reader must be interested in the subject matter, but there’s a lot to pacing as well. If the reader gets bored, if the story starts to drag, they are out of there.
I’m not sure if I’ll be reading more of Dragonlands at this point. Characters are the biggest part of a story to me. Since I didn’t latch onto any of the ones in this book, I feel lukewarm. I’m curious enough to pick up the next book, but I’m not dying too. I think I’ll step away from these high-fantasy-esque stories after I finish reading King of Scars. I’m a genre hopper and a moody reader. So, we’ll see what happens.
What fantasy books are you reading right now?
