Author: James Maxey
Publisher: Quality Press (no website found)
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Erratum:
"…an unjust law may be disobeyed in good conscious" should be "…an unjust law may be disobeyed in good conscience" (page 97)
Well this book is different! I'm not a big fan of dragon stories, but once in a while one comes along and entertains me. Neither am I a fan of series. Call me npc, but I prefer the new rather than the recycled old, so it was interesting to read a story about dragons that had a new approach. The problem was that this novel became really boring about two-thirds the way through, and I lost all interest in it.
There's a prologue in this novel which I skipped as I always do. I've never regretted not reading a prologue and if the author doesn't feel it’s important enough to go into chapter one (or beyond), I surely don’t feel it important enough to waste time in reading. That said, the opening chapter was a grabber. A hunter is sitting by his forest camp fire eating dragon tongue. The dead dragon is lodged in a tree above his head, brought down by his expertly placed arrow, but this dragon has a backpack… Okay, it’s satchel, but wouldn’t a backpack have been way cool? However, this is one of those traditional fantasies, where backpacks don’t exist, so satchel it is.
The satchel shows that this dragon is a sentient being - a scholar, even. The man burns the notebook the dragon had been keeping. He is old and gray, and is headed for a dragon ceremony which the hunter is evidently seeking to disrupt, a sun-dragon ceremony at which the first human to ever witness such an event and live to tell of it, is awaiting its start with anticipation.
Despite being human, Jandra has been raised since childhood by the dragons and fully empathizes with them if not all of them with her. Actually, it was one dragon, Vendevorex, a sky dragon (like the one in the tree), and the king's personal wizard, who raised her. Why dragons would have such institutions as the monarchy is not explained, and I found it most peculiar.
I'm not a fan of monarchies and privilege of birth, but I realize that they are part and parcel of this kind of fantasy. It would be nice, though, once in a while, to see writers step off the path most traveled and carve out some new routes; however, this author certainly takes a half-step, because story is rife with interesting perspectives on dragon-lore, and he doesn’t leave it solely at that.
This story could, in some ways, be described as modeling itself after Planet of the Apes, since there are three types of dragon. The sun dragons, like the chimpanzees, are the nobility. Their guards and soldiers are the earth dragons who fulfill the role of the gorillas. Finally there are the urang-utans, which are the sky-dragons, who are scholars and scientists.
The sun dragon ceremony, which was rudely interrupted, is how a new king is chosen. The king's first-born male offspring is banished from the dragon's presence, and forced to live by their own means until they reach a point where they feel they can challenge the king. If one of them can do so successfully, he becomes the new king. In this case, there are two contenders, but one of them - the more scholarly one - rejects the barbaric hunt of enslaved humans - a frivolous ceremony which precedes the main event. His brother goes after the human as tradition demands - and is slaughtered in the forest from a brutal rain of well-aimed arrows, all from the bow of the lone hunter. "Bitterwood" cries the king, and lets loose the dogs of war. But Bitterwood escapes by means of a sewer cover which lies in the middle of the highway!
Yes, if that grabbed you as it did me, you'll want to know more, but I'm not going to tell you because the rest of the novel conveniently pretends that never happened! I guess you have to go to volume two or three to find out, and I'm not playing that game! I will tell you that one thing I found really odd in Bitterwood was the prologues. I don’t do prologues. I routinely skip them and I never miss them. That ought to tell you plenty.
In this case, I skipped the one at the start, but when we reached part two of the book, there was another prologue! I'm like, "Wait, wasn't part one the prologue to part two? I don’t get this authorial OCD with prologues! If it’s important, then put it into chapter one or later! If you don’t consider it material that's worth including in the body of the novel, I don’t consider it’s material that's worth reading.
This turned out to be great - an original novel looking at the world from the dragon PoV where humans are mere subjects, and I was enjoying it until Jandra quit being a pet of Vendevorex's and became a pet of Petar (Peta?!) Gondwell, who promptly man-handled her and treated her very much like property - and not once did she object or even have qualms about it. So much for a strong female character!
At one point, being brave when others would run, Jandra gets her throat slit. Not her jugular, but her trachea, and there's a lot of blood. When Vendevorex tells her he's going to magically close the wound, she nods her head. WHAT? Her throat is slit deeply and she's nodding her head? I think this is a case of a writer not paying close attention to what it is they're writing!
Oh, and it's "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" - not "Origins of Species" as it's rendered on page 207! But by that point I was skimming pages because the story got lost and was not in the least bit interesting to me. I can't recommend this and will not be following this series.
