Fantasy Review: 'Mark of the Dragon Queen' by Katie W Stewart

I rather enjoyed 'Treespeaker' by the same author, so I was more than willing to try this. It turns out to be very different. The setting is a fairly generic one - a small town ruled by a lord, with doctors and horse-drawn buggies and a stratified society, but also with wizardry and dragons. Magic is tightly controlled in this particular realm. The main character, Kira, is living a quiet life with her widowed father, a teacher, when he uses magic to save a child's life, breaking an oath and condemning himself to death. The story follows Kira's attempts to rescue him from his fate.

There is an interesting story in here, and the background was very intriguing. The use of magic, how and when it can be used, the crystals which somehow enable its use to be monitored, the way it operates elsewhere, the agreement with the dragons - all of this was rather nice, and I would have liked to know more. But for me things fell apart with the characters, particularly Kira.

Now, there's no immutable law that says that every female main character in fantasy has to be feisty, resourceful, independent-minded and spirited. It's perfectly possible for a heroine (or hero, for that matter) to be timid, nervous, awkward, reclusive or shy, and still bravely do whatever the plot calls upon them to do. But what really doesn't work is stupidity, and Kira, it has to be said, is stupid. I thought at first she was just very young - everyone calls her 'child', and she acts like one, too. People treat her as if she's some delicate flower who has to be protected from the wind at all costs. Initially I guessed she was about six or so, but no - turns out she is actually fifteen. Even having lived a very sheltered life, she should be more sensible than she appears here.

First she is startled and falls over while escaping with her father, getting herself injured and causing him nobly to sacrifice himself so that she can be treated. Then she droops around doing nothing very much for several months, being looked after by helpful friends. Then when she thinks a former student of her father's, Arun, is going to rescue him, she decides to tag along. Why? What can she possibly hope to achieve? She has no skills, no magic, no artefacts which could conceivably make any difference, and she's so helpless, she's only likely to get in the way. As she does, in fact. When he (very sensibly) tells her to go home, she follows him anyway and manages to fall in the river. And so on. She isn't the only one making irrational decisions in this book (Arun is not without blame here, and Kira's father isn't always sensible either) but Kira is the worst. Being determined is an admirable quality, but not without a modicum of common sense.

The other characters are either good, kind people, or thoroughly bad people, with no in between, and sometimes without an obvious reason for being bad. The woman who is nasty to Kira, for instance, because her father has been sent to Verebor prison - why? In a small town, where Kira has grown up, there would surely be a great deal of sympathy for her situation, and people would rally round to help. It's designed to make the reader sympathise with her, perhaps, but it just seemed unrealistic to me.

This may seem very critical, but it's purely a personal reaction. There's a good story in here, and plenty of action. For those who don't mind a heroine who starts off rather limply and (I assume) becomes more self-sufficient later, this would work very well, and there are some interesting details to the magic system and background to be uncovered. I enjoyed the author's 'Treespeaker', a more unusual story than this, so it's not the author's writing style that's the problem here, but purely the extreme wetness of the main character which grates on me. I got about a third of the way through before giving up. One star for a DNF.

Review: 'Treespeaker' by Katie W Stewart

This was another free book, although I have no idea where I got it from (it's still cheap on Amazon). I've learned to be wary of freebies, but there's no need with this one - it's a charming and absorbing story, well-written and thankfully also well-edited. It's a quiet tale of one man and his son trying to protect their people's way of life from encroaching outsiders. Those with a liking for action should look elsewhere; there are no battles, no sword fights and not a single buckle is swashed.

I very much liked the setting - a gentle society living (rather idealistically, it must be said) in harmony with their forest, protected by their god Arrakesh and his mouthpiece Jakan, the Treespeaker of the title. It's probably not a realistic way of life (acorn bread?? and how do they manage to find so much firewood without impacting the forest?) but then this is fantasy. The most disappointing aspect, for me, was the traditional division of labour - men hunt and collect firewood and mend the roof, women tend goats and vegetables, and cook and sew. But at least the women could become Elders, which is something, I suppose. But I would have liked a little more information about the lifestyle of the Arrakeshi. And a map - fantasy is always better with a map, in my opinion (I did eventually find a rather sketchy one on one of the author's numerous websites/blogs).

The story is, it has to be said, somewhat simplistic. The Arrakeshi, with their principle of living in harmony with the forest, are definitely the good guys, and Carlika, the world outside, is the Big Bad, set on eliminating or enslaving the Arrakeshi and exploiting the forest resources. And although some attempt is made to justify these actions (they are forced to use slaves to dig for coal because they destroyed all their own forests, slavers have to earn a crust too and so on), it's fairly half-hearted. Carlika itself is rather glossed over - there are roads and farms and towns and villages, but the story jumps quickly from one place to another, and Jakan's reactions to this strange environment are only sparsely described. Since he has never left the forest before, it should feel more alien to him, yet this seldom comes across.

The magic systems used by the two societies are equally differentiated. The Arrakeshi have a Treespeaker for each tribe, who is in communication with the god Arrakesh through the forest itself, and follow orders regarding the number of deer they can hunt each year, and so on, to maintain a proper balance. The Treespeaker also has healing powers, augmented by a special kind of stone. The Carlikans have a more destructive kind of magic, which can control minds, create fire, fell trees and generally wreak havoc.

The characters are not overly deep, but they do have a certain quirky charm. I would have liked to see some of the female roles given more screen-time, rather than being used as background characters to help or motivate the leading men, or simply to move the plot along. The two main characters, Jakan and his son Dovan, would have worked just as well as women, I think. But it's a minor point, and some of the older women are interesting - Megda and Hekja, for instance. And all the characters are realistic mixtures of good and bad impulses.

The plot gets a little contrived towards the end, or maybe it's intended to be allegorical or some such, who knows. It could have done with a slightly slower pace, too. There was a lot of Jakan's journey that was just passed over, and in no time we were back in the forest. I understand the author's desire to get to the climax, but the whole quest seemed all too easy, somehow. In particular, he found Varyd without the slightest bother. The final confrontation produced a few nice twists, but generally the outcome was very much as you would expect, with some unexpected magical events (close to deus ex machina at points) to help things along, and everything set up nicely for a sequel (although this reads perfectly well as a stand-alone).

It's not a profound book, and some of the 'you just got to have faith' and 'there has to be balance' messages were layered on with a trowel. As the author says: "This is not a book about good versus evil. This is a book about belonging, balance and belief." OK, we get it. It is also a very readable, straightforward story of one man struggling to do the right thing, even when he isn't quite sure what that is. I found it a great page-turner, with emotionally engaging characters, a heart-wrenching problem for them to solve and an intriguing, if not overly detailed, setting. An enjoyable read. Somewhere between three and four stars, but I'll be generous, so let's say four.