Books #42 and #43 of 2023: The Dragons of Decay (book #3) and The Dragons Return (book #1)

[thistlechaser]

My Kindle is such a mess. After it deleted all of my books and I re-uploaded the ones I thought I hadn't read yet, I ended up with... such a mess. For some reason I had book #3 of this series uploaded. Do I own 1 and 2? Had I read any of the series before? Who knows.

I started reading book 3, decided I liked it enough to keep reading, but not enough to stop reading and go find book 1. By the time I was halfway done with 3, I wanted to continue with the series, but didn't want to stop reading to go back to book 1.

So here we are now. Thanks, Kindle.

The Dragons of Ice and Snow (Tales from the New Earth, book 3) by J. J. Thompson.

So, book 3 of a series that I hadn't read. Why did I own a copy of it? Book 3 of an 8 book series? Who knows.

The plot was easy enough to follow, even without having read the previous three books. Set on Earth, magic suddenly returned, and with it dragons. Dragons killed off 99.9999% of the human population. Those humans left were Changed-with-a-capital-C.

Changed into what? Basically D&D characters. Clerics, warriors, rangers, mages, wizards, etc. There were just a handful of these Changed humans left around the world, and the main character (the only Wizard on Earth), was trying to organize things enough to save them from the evil dragons.

While the book had quite a few flaws (grammar issues, formatting issues, and a really odd overuse of hyphens), it was a really entertaining story. By the time I was done with this book, I was eager to go back to book 1 and start there, so I could see how all the characters had gotten to this point in book 4

The Dragons Return (Tales from the New Earth, book 1) by J. J. Thompson.

Finally done with 3, I moved on to book 1! And I was disappointed. So disappointed.

I had expected book 1 to be about how modern everyday humans coped with suddenly having completely different bodies and magic skills (magic skills, being more physically powerful than an ox, having contact with literal gods, whatever came with their new role), but nope. Book 1 started three years after everyone Changed. Why? Why not cover what would be the most interesting part of the story?

Oh well, the author and I must have very different ideas of what the interesting parts are.

In book 3, the Wizard (Simon) was mega-powerful, but I had figured that he earned that through the previous two books. Nope. In book one, a god touches him on the head and gives him all the power, knowledge, and spells of every Wizard that had previously lived. So much for a character earning power!

I was also really curious about how Simon got a tower to live in. There aren't that many castle-like towers around in the real world, and the book is set in the real world. Turns out that, right before magic returned, Simon (an IT worker) bought a land and built a tower on it. What a cop-out...

Oh well. It was still a good story, even if some of the plot points disappointed me.

Like in book 3, in this story Simon had to fight a dragon to save the few Changed humans that are alive. I have a strong suspicion that books 2 and 4+ will have the same plot (since there are five primal dragons and the dark gods they serve, probably one major kill per book).

I have book 2 and 4 already, so I'm going to keep going with the series for now.