book review, The King's Dragon

[kareina]

 In between errands and computer stuff I finished reading The King’s Dragon by Kate Elliott. I started it at least a week ago (when I did my first log entry for tracking reading, but was already 200 pages in, so I strongly suspect I just failed to mske a note of it). I remember that I bought the book much longer ago than that, but after downloading the app complained that I needed to activate some sort of Adobe security thing, which I had previously activated for another book, and it just didn’t work, so I gave up and forgot about it for weeks, till I bought another book for school that had a similar issue, and when i solved it, by getting yet another book app, the new book app worked for this one too.

 

However, the delay between purchasing and access means that I have long since whose recommendation got me to buy it, and what they said that got me past my inherent reluctance to buy stuff. Whatever it was, it didn’t warn me about how very, very unpleasant huge parts of the story are, with abusive people being abusive. I almost didn’t finish due to that aspect early on, but decided to persevere, as somewhere, somewhen, someone whose opinion I respect had said something good about the book.

 

I am still not sure what that praise might have been. Our viewpoint characters experience many very unpleasant things, and at no time did I wish I could live in this world, which is full of religious fanatics, sexism, class opression, and callousness. Yah, sure, the sexism is packaged a little different than is the world we live in, as power and inheritance is more through the female line, but it is still very unpleasant.

 

Like many classic fantasy books, this one focuses on young people who are raised to believe they are unimportant and outside the established power structure, and by the end of this book at least one is revealed to be very much part of it after all, and the other has been set up to soon be significant in kingdom scale politics.

 

I have always been an addicted re-reader, loving to go back to books now that I know the overall framework of the story to pick up the details and connections I missed on the first pass, and to learn who everyone is. Especially for a book like this one, where the viewpoint characters don’t cross paths till late in the book, so there are double the number of people to try to kerp track of. However, I don’t know if I am willing to go back and read through those abusive bits again. Once feels like too many, and one can’t un-read to get the bad taste out of the brain.

 

If you can ignore that aspect and enjoy major political upheaval, battles and betrayal, this might be a book for you.