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Book #33 of 2019: Dragon Frontier, 2019 book: With Eyes Turned Skyward
Dragon Frontier by Dan Abnett
Traditional or self-published: Traditional
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
This was such a good idea for a story, it's just too bad the writing completely let it down.
Set in the old west, Native Americans had dragons ("Thunderbirds") as well as horses. Such a fun idea! One I've never read before!
Too bad everything else about the book completely did not work for me. The characters' motivations were unbelievable, and that was the least bad issue this book had. It did that annoying trope where a white person shows up in a native tribe and is 100% better than anyone who grew up in the culture. The main character, a young boy, was a one-in-a-generation special person in the tribe.
All that would be bad enough, but I had said to myself "If only men are permitted to ride dragons, I'm going to stop reading"... and that was unsurprisingly true. Women could only cook food and take care of people, no dragon riding for them! But I was almost done with the book by that point, so I read the last bit of it anyway.
I don't usually think much about the effects books have on kids, but this was a middle grade book, so young people would read it. Is this the kind of thing we want them thinking is okay?
With Eyes Turned Skyward by Gregory Stravinski
Traditional or self-published: Self-published
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
I'm such a bad reviewer. I read this one before Dragon Frontier, so I should have posted about it before reading a whole 'nother book. I barely remember what my issues with this one were, other than the author spent so many pages thanking people and advertising their services with links and email addresses. Add onto that that the author himself said his book wasn't good enough to actually get published, and I was turned off before I even read the first page of the story.
The plot was okay (world ended, people live up in the sky on airships) but the writing was meh and the editing was really bad (even though apparently the author had paid one for the service/listed the email address for the editor in the Thanks section). Not worth sticking with.
Traditional or self-published: Traditional
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
This was such a good idea for a story, it's just too bad the writing completely let it down.
Set in the old west, Native Americans had dragons ("Thunderbirds") as well as horses. Such a fun idea! One I've never read before!
Too bad everything else about the book completely did not work for me. The characters' motivations were unbelievable, and that was the least bad issue this book had. It did that annoying trope where a white person shows up in a native tribe and is 100% better than anyone who grew up in the culture. The main character, a young boy, was a one-in-a-generation special person in the tribe.
All that would be bad enough, but I had said to myself "If only men are permitted to ride dragons, I'm going to stop reading"... and that was unsurprisingly true. Women could only cook food and take care of people, no dragon riding for them! But I was almost done with the book by that point, so I read the last bit of it anyway.
I don't usually think much about the effects books have on kids, but this was a middle grade book, so young people would read it. Is this the kind of thing we want them thinking is okay?
With Eyes Turned Skyward by Gregory Stravinski
Traditional or self-published: Self-published
Rating: Disliked (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)
I'm such a bad reviewer. I read this one before Dragon Frontier, so I should have posted about it before reading a whole 'nother book. I barely remember what my issues with this one were, other than the author spent so many pages thanking people and advertising their services with links and email addresses. Add onto that that the author himself said his book wasn't good enough to actually get published, and I was turned off before I even read the first page of the story.
The plot was okay (world ended, people live up in the sky on airships) but the writing was meh and the editing was really bad (even though apparently the author had paid one for the service/listed the email address for the editor in the Thanks section). Not worth sticking with.