Rating: WARTY!
This is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
Errata:
"She knew it would earn her a lecture from Jackson if the she ever saw Amara do that" - the 'she' should be a 'he' and the 'the' should be omitted.
"Its bright blue eyes glinted off the sun" - surely the other way around?!
"Amara tried to get up and move but found her hands, chained to the floor." That comma doesn't belong there. It should be placed after 'move'.
"Let me go, there is a dragon I need to slay," is a run-on sentence.
This novel is written in a rather innocent style which initially charmed me, but over time it became rather more disagreeable to read, and after about twenty percent I DNF'd it because this simplicity of writing wasn't entertaining me at all. I found that the narrative was superficial, with no history and no depth and often nonsensical, so it became far less charming as it went on, and I was asking questions which the story didn't seem interested in answering.
I couldn't have put it better than one reviewer who gave this a five-star review while telling us next-to-nothing about what it had done to earn those stars. In one part of the very short review, the reviewer said, "... Amara the dragonslayer hunts and kills a dragon and the story starts to unravel from there..." and that's exactly what it did: unravel. I rather suspect the reviewer meant to say it 'unfolded' from there, but what it really did was unravel, so she inadvertently got it right.
The story is set in a future post-apocalyptic world where, for reasons which go unexplained, Chicago, which was evidently burned to the ground by dragons, was rebuilt in stone, because dragons apparently can't melt stone, although this claim is overturned when shortly after the story begins, the main HQ of the dragon-slayer force is pretty much burned to the ground by a dragon, despite it being built from stone. Worse though, the story failed to address the fact that Chicago was largely built of stone to begin with - at least when it came to the main buildings downtown - since it is such an old city (by USA standards). It would hardly have been burned down as described. Yes, the newer stuff is glass and steel, but even that incorporates huge amounts of concrete (which is for all practical purposes, stone), and most of the older large buildings are stone, so none of this made sense to me.
It made less sense as to why the rebuilt Chicago would be renamed Athena. There is no precedent for this. If the story had been set in Athens, in Georgia, I could see it maybe being renamed Athena, although even that's a stretch, but renaming Chicago? The city was named after a wild onion that grew abundantly in that area, and has had that name since the late seventeenth century. There would need to be a really overwhelming reason to change it so drastically, and maybe that would even happen, but the problem is that we're not given any reason why it did happen, just the credibility-straining bare fact of the name change, and it doesn't work. It simply makes it seem whimsical and random.
There were lots of errors in the text, some of which I've documented above. There were other oddball issues such as when I read, "Even though Emery was attractive, she did not trust him." I don't get the connection there! Are we supposed to trust people just because they're attractive?! Why would his attractiveness (or otherwise) have any bearing on his trustworthiness?! At another point, I read, "Their bodies did not have scales in the drawings, making their skin look like that of a snake." Well, snakes actually do have scales! At another point I read, "...men took point in the front." Taking point quite literally means assuming an exposed position in front! It's a tautology to say that someone takes point in front! I quite understand that mistakes appear in novels. We've all been there, but the sheer number of them in this story was a major reason why the writing lost its charm for me.
A major problem with the future presented here is that this one city (Athena) is totally divorced from everywhere else in the world, like it's the only place that exists. It isn't, but it feels that way. This is all-too-often the problem with this type of novel. It's not been properly thought-through: the author has focused so tightly on the little story that unfolds in this one location, and hasn't given an ounce of thought to how this apocalyptic scenario would have played out on the world stage. This insularity: that only the USA matters, and in this case, that only this one city matters within the USA, is really a problem not just in this story, but in a much wider context of how a person's mind works. If you get into a mentality that none of the rest of the world is important, then it's a serious delusion that I'm not in favor of promoting, not even in fiction. On top of that, it makes for a very claustrophobic story. What happened to the government? The police forces? The military? We get no explanation. It's like all of that somehow disappeared along with the cities of old. It makes the story sound very artificial.
Related to this is the total isolation of one city from another. We're told that the area between cities is a wasteland where no one wants to live, but when Amara, the main character, is kidnapped, she's transported to a thriving community that exists within sight of the city. No one in the city ever noticed this? Despite this, and despite there still being people around from Amara's dragon enforcement bureau, or whatever it's called (I forget), no one traces the attack back to this community despite their use of 'Hummers' to travel back and forth on their attacks.
Worse, Amara never tries to escape despite being completely free to do so. She never attempts to report back to her people in the city and tell them what's going on, and we're given no good reason for this; yet we're expected to believe she's the best there is at what she does. She even participates in another attack on her own headquarters in which she takes part freely, and has no remorse about it! Her motivations do not work.
I didn't get the Hummers, either. The last Hummer rolled-off the production line in 2010. Are we to believe these gas-guzzling catastrophes were still hale and hearty almost a century later? That would be like driving the Ford Model T today as an everyday run-about rather than a classic car. It's too much of a stretch. Here's the thing: if everything that wasn't stone was razed to the ground, then so was all of the gas and oil infrastructure, so whence the gasoline that the Hummers run on? Where does it come from? Who processes it from oil - and where does the oil come from in the first place? How does this tiny community which kidnaps Amara, pay for itself? Hummers get only some ten miles or so to the gallon, maybe a little better at a relatively low speed on the highway, but not rumbling over rough terrain in a post-apocalyptic world, so they'd need a lot of gas, and it's like the gas magically appears from nowhere.
Maybe it does because there was another component of this story which was the magical abilities. Amara wasn't born. She was somehow created in a genetics lab, and endowed with special abilities. How magic was inbred into her is again unexplained, but what's worse is that she almost never uses her magical abilities, which are ill-defined to begin with. Maybe there are limitations on them, but we never know, since it's never specified what she can and cannot do. To judge from the endless times she seems unable to employ magic, it would seem that it's so limited and weak as to be pointless, so why include it at all? It doesn't help her fight dragons. It doesn't help her avoid being kidnapped, or to escape when she's briefly confined. It doesn't help her to solve any mystery she was faced with during her captivity in that first 20% of the novel. And she's supposed to be the best there is?
There's a weak love interest which, as usual in YA novels, has zero basis. We're offered no reason why Amara, genetically engineered so she isn't distracted from her dragon-slaying purpose by anything, including men, starts falling for this one guy. There's no reason for it. There could have been, if the story had had a little more depth. There could have been something about this guy which really resonated with Amara, but we're not given that or anything else to explain it, so the rationale wasn't there and the relationship is forced, as it is in nearly every YA story I've read.
At one point I read, "He had almost died in her arms, they were forever bonded from through experience and she couldn't leave without knowing he would be okay." In addition to being a run-on - and slightly nonsensical - sentence ("from through experience"?!), the problem here is that she barely knows this guy and has had her limited acquaintanceship with him for only a short time. There's no way she could realistically feel this way about him unless she's a moron, and especially not since she's genetically-programmed not to have such crushes!
The fact that she's genetically engineered is a problem in itself. Even today, we cannot genetically-engineer a healthy human let alone a super human, so how would this be possible in a post-apocalyptic world a mere eighty years into the future? How did such a devastated society manage to rebuild so quickly and get so far ahead of even where we are now? It makes no sense!
Maybe by now you can see my problem with this: the basic idea was great and the author has some real story-telling potential. I wish her all the best in her career, but no matter how good an idea is or how charming it starts out, if it keeps on racking-up one improbable assertion after another, as this one did, and if it fails to build a solid foundation, it's not going to win me over. This one faield to do that, and for the reasons I listed, I can't commend it as a worthy read.
