
[I stopped accepting book for review years ago, but Dragonborn looked interesting and it isn't being published until October, so I made an exception for it. I shouldn't have.]
Dragonborn by Struan Murray.
Quick synopsis: "Yer a dragon, Harry." Take Harry Potter but replace magic for dragons, and you have 75% of this book. A girl who is a dragon in human form has to learn to be a dragon and save the (dragon) world.
Brief opinion: I stopped accepting books for review years ago because when I'm gifted a book to review it makes me feel like I have to say only positive things (which of course the publishers know). If I had gotten this book on my own, I would have DNFed it by the halfway point. That's not to say it's a bad book, it just wasn't for me.
Plot: Alex, a young girl, lives with the most domineering and controlling
family mother who ever existed. Her father died a couple years earlier, so Alex is trying to just live a normal life with school and such, despite her mother's efforts.
Weird
magic stuff starts happening around her town, and so one day
Hagrid Oliphos shows up and takes her to
Hogwarts Skralla.
Alex, while trying to embrace the fact that she's a dragon, is discovered to have a super special talent to talk to dead dragons. A skill that can save the whole dragon world!
Unfortunately
Voldemort Drak Midna is rising from the sort-of-dead, after a magical the special powers that Alex has, in a war that will divide the
wizarding dragon world.
Writing/editing: The version I read is an ARC, and contained a warning that there might be typos and such, but even though it hadn't been through its final edits, the editing was good.
The cover image had weird issues, but I chalk that up to this being an ARC.
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: A good YA or MG book can be enjoyed by any age reader, but you can't fault the book if it is enjoyable to
only young readers. That's the case of Dragonborn. I suspect kids would like it a lot, but as an adult reader it didn't work at all for me.
The adult characters in this book were generally, at best, secondary to the young characters and at worse useless (that thing where adult characters exist only to get in the way of the young main characters). The mother especially was so useless that she was completely unbelievable.
The author did a weird thing with his writing, skipping steps in action. For example:
Weary, hungry, they flew off in search of food. They settled on a rooftop, sharing a bag of chips. That kind of thing happened a couple times, forcing me to blink in surprise and reread to try to see where the missing action was.
I was very surprised to see the hardcover version of this book is going to sell for $19.99. I haven't bought a physical book in more than 15 years, so that sounds so crazy to me!
One of the adult characters used "wee" ("wee child", "wee snack") endlessly. It felt like every other word out of his mouth was "wee". By the halfway point of the book I was gritting my teeth every time he said it.
On things I liked, I did really enjoy that the main character collected "treasure" before she even knew she was a dragon.
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️ - Disliked. I suspect a young reader would like this book a whole lot more than I did though.
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Reach for Infinity edited by Jonathan Strahan.
Quick synopsis: A hard science fiction anthology containing 14 stories.
Brief opinion: I've said it before and I'll say it again: Jonathan Strahan's tastes are polar opposite of mine. All of these anthologies edited by him never work for me.
Of the 14 stories, one I enjoyed and two more were okay, but the rest didn't work for me at all. (These three I liked were ones that generally got the lowest reviews by other readers, which confirms that hard sci-fi is just not for me. I like characters more than technical detail.)
Plot: The story I liked best was
Attitude, a novella by Linda Nagata. Set in the future, an innovator finds a way to make a sports league drive moving humanity into space -- all the profits from the new sport she invented go towards building a city in space.
In Babelsberg by Alastair Reynolds was interesting until the ending (a cyborg who was created to explore the universe comes back to Earth for a media tour).
Amicae Aeternum by Ellen Klages. A young girl is days away from joining her family aboard a generational ship and leaving Earth forever. She spends the morning with her best friend doing things for the last time. [While I liked this one, I can see why others complained about it. Other than mention of the generational ship, there was no sci-fi about this one at all.]
Writing/editing: Both were generally okay.
What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: Hard sci-fi just isn't for me. The three stories I liked were the ones that were more about characters than tech.
Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️ - Disliked. I have two or three more of these Infinity books on my Kindle, but I might just delete them without reading them. My luck with the series so far has been pretty bad.