Book #71 of 2024: Beastlands: Race to Frostfall Mountain | DNF: The Last Dragonslayer

Now that I finished that trilogy, back to "reading all books on my Kindle with 'dragon' in the title or a picture of a dragon on the cover". Or in this case, something that I thought was a dragon but wasn't really one. Covers on my Kindle are tiny.

Beastlands: Race to Frostfall Mountain by Jess French.

Quick synopsis: Set on a fantasy planet (maybe), three children from different (enemy) nations have to band together to both try to stop a plague and prevent the world from changing in a way that humans won't be able to live on it anymore.

Brief opinion: Just when I thought I was done reading YA/MG books, this little gem came along.

Plot: Set on what might be a fantasy world (or might be a planet that humans from Earth traveled to and lived there long enough to forget where they came from), "Beasts" (native animals) are so numerous and so dangerous, humanity lives only in three walled cities (each one called a nation, even though its only a city).

Kayla is a young girl from Sophiatown, she's in training to become a Sky Rider -- humans paired with a lion-bat-like flying creature.

Ataria is a healer and Rustus is a (failed) warrior, both from Ataria.

For different reasons, each ends up outside of their city walls and end up finding each other. The three band together to try to cure the Scourge (a new plague) and to stop the bad people from creating a new creature that will bring an end to humanity's time on the world.

Ataria was very Rome-ish, and "Sophiatown" would be an odd name for a city to come up with, if it grew naturally on a world where they don't speak English. I could be reading too much into it, but it really felt more like humans were on an alien planet than this was just a fantasy world.

Writing/editing: I was grumpy at the lack of Oxford commas (sigh), and now and then two different characters' dialogue was in the same paragraph. That made for some confusing reading:

"Do you have the Scourge?" she asked. "No," he replied.

and

"She may not even have a salinka yet," Rustus reasoned. "But what if she does?" snapped Kayla.

There were a couple small story mistakes (like the characters had "almost a full day of sleep" and later in the same chapter one thought "Maybe it was the lack of sleep...").

And one logic thing in general. Describing a piece of clothing: "designed by the city tailors to be insulating, cooling and lightweight." Can a piece of clothing be both insulating and cooling?

What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like: This was such a realistic look at how humans deal with nature and animals when humanity wants to expand into new lands. Whole species were wiped out so that things could be safer for the people.

I loved all the animals and planets of this world -- they were so realistic!

I'm way older than this book is intended for, but I never guessed what was going to happen or where the story was going.

Really, I enjoyed the whole story from beginning to end. Only sad part is that book 2 doesn't come out until 2025.

Rating: 1-Hated / 2-Disliked / 3-Okay / 4-Liked / 5-Loved: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 5 stars, loved.

DNF #59: The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde. Nothing about this book worked for me. I didn't connect with the characters, the writing style didn't work for me, and it was supposed to be funny but wasn't at all to me.