/lit/ - Literature

With Dragon Outcast I finish The Age of Fire trilogy. My judgement: it was lacking. There's a lot of great ideas here, morality of characters is on point, world-building makes sense, feels real and authentic. I wanted books about Dragons and in that respect the author delivered, Dragons made sense as a species living in this world, powerful and proud, yet still in danger of hominids (humanoid races). However, only the first book could be called truly 'complete.' It was obvious the author could write well-enough after the first book, but the second was a derivative repetition that brought only few fresh ideas. The third one falls short in every regard. Most of the book I'd call plain boring, only the last 30% of Dragon Outcast is interesting, marginally.

I knew how the book will go on since the start, as the author seems to be incapable of using a different story structure than the one he started with. Youth, some struggles, then mentor figures, meeting new people, growing up into a social position and then some war/conflict at the end. Painfuly repetetive, mostly because of execution.

This book tried to try its strengths at scheming and typical fights for power among nobles (dragons in this instance), but couldn't offer anything more than cliches. Not convincing cliches, at that. The events at the end, or rather beahviour or characters, made me lose some braincells while reading. How can a person write dialogues so inauthentic? People don't talk like that, even absolute cliches. I'm a bit mad, actually, because I know the author could do better than this. One could even call this book rushed, unpolished.

The main characters in the series lack consistent characterization, looking back, with the third one suffering the most of it. It's as if there was an outline with some ideas and themes, and then the author pushed the character into it, giving it proper things to say, but without any substance. You can barely guess what the protagonist is thinking. It's a bit unnerving, because it's like watching actors trying their best to act according to a script that makes little sense.

Nonetheless, I don't regret reading the trilogy. I'll try reading the first book of the second trilogy, as this one felt very much like a set-up for a bigger story, but one should know when to cut their loses with books. There are better books out there, always remember that, reading bros. Here's to hope the fourth book's better.

5/10, could use another draft.