If you would name your kid Sapien, you might like this book.

[thistlechaser]

Book #12 of 2013: Dragon and Thief: The First Dragonback Adventure by Timothy Zahn.

This may have been the most unbelievable, unrealistic book I've read so far this year.

In it a boy thief gets bonded to a member of an alien dragon species. A dragon named Draycos. Which sounds like Dracos. A dragon named Draycos/Dracos. I just... how in the world did... what was the reasoning behind naming one member of a whole dragon race, a planet full of dragons, that? How does that work? Did the other dragons tease him over his name? Imagine a human parent introducing their kids. "This is Homo and this is Sapien."

I wish that had been the biggest issue in this book. So the biggest corporation in the entire universe wants to frame this boy thief (who has his own spaceship, the whole thing is set in space). So they give him a package to deliver. When he gets to where he's supposed to hand it over, the box is empty. He figures out it was full of dry ice. So the kid calls the corporation security people out on this, telling them he knows it was dry ice. "Oh no!" say the employees of the biggest corporation in the entire universe to the teenager who has a criminal record as a thief and a con artist. "You've figured us out! Now we can't use that to frame you! *kills two random people walking down the street* Haha! We'll pin murder on you instead!"

Seriously, WTF. Like the courts would take the word of a kid wanted by the law, who has lied and stolen in the past, over the word of these seemingly-fine upstanding business people? And the business people think it's a reasonable next step to kill people?

The whole book was full of things like that. These bad guys were so over the top bad, plus they were painfully stupid. How cliche is it that they told the good guys outright how they were going to kill them before starting to do it? "We're going to throw you out of an airlock! There's an unguarded one at (exact location)!" And on top of that, they walked the two people they were going to kill through a whole space cruise ship full of people and security and the two good guys kept quiet because otherwise the bad guys might kill someone.

It's a darned good thing this book was such a fast read or I would have stopped. It had some good ideas: the dragon species could switch between being two-dimensional and three-, plus needed a symbiont to live. (The boy thief just happened to be a match...) The dragon could ride in 2D on the boy (I was picturing like a tattoo). It was an interesting idea. The book had a small good twist early on as well, but it was no where near enough to save the book.

Add on top of all that (do I even need to say more?) that the main character was the most god-awful annoying teenage boy I've ever read about. He was always growling or whining, he was rude/mean/ungrateful/teasing the dragon. He was just so very unpleasant to read about. (An accurate teenage boy? Maybe. Someone I enjoyed reading about? NO.) So we had two main characters, the awful teenage boy and the dragon named Draycos... This is the first book of a series of six, but I have zero interest in reading the others.

Whatever book I read next, I hope it's a good one. Seems like it's been a while since I had one I really enjoyed.

Comments

[jeane nevarez (from livejournal.com)]

Ha. If I'd read this before finding Dragon and Thief at my library sale, I think I wouldn't have picked it up! Yeah, there's stuff that doesn't make sense. But it was far more sensible than a lot of things that happen regularly in Animorphs books, so I just breezed past those details. Or maybe it was just on par and I liked the concept of a multi-dimensional alien dragon so much I was willing to ignore stuff. I didn't get hung up on the name- but I should have maybe.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

I was wondering that as well: If I hadn't gotten so hung up on the name, maybe I would have liked it more. Either way, I'm going to try to find something else by him to read soon.