Dragons!

…are actually probably the weakest part of the book. We’ll get back to that.

They watch us kneel, they see the back of our heads, and they think we’ve given in. They don’t realize you can think from your knees just as well as from your feet.

What we have here is an epic fantasy world, full of the aforementioned dragons and strife and war… but for a change, this world is set in the near aftermath of the collapse of the old regime and the rise of the good guys. In theory.

Everyone gets a chance at education. Even commoners–even orphans of the revolution–can apply to be trained as dragon riders.

From there, we get the first half of the book–a straight up magic school style training montage. It feels awfully YA, in the genre of The Hunger Games / Divergent / Harry Potter, up to and including a school tournament to decide the ‘best dragonrider’.

What really makes the book shine to me is that initial setting–the idea that we’re shortly after a revolution, building something new. And the entirely too real chance that the anything new… might be just as bad as what came before.

Now… the dragons. Despite the fact that all of our main characters have a dragon and they’re present throughout the series–they never seem to really have any personality or presence of their own.

Even now, I don’t think I could honestly tell you more than the subspecies of each dragon, and even then only barely. I like intelligent dragons (a la Temeraire) and love books with more alien dragons (The Rage of Dragons shines here). These are almost more like cars or fighter jets than anything.

And that’s really a bummer.

Overall, I enjoyed the series. And the way things go towards the latter part of the book + the ending really make me curious where in the world it’s going from here.

Onward!