“Robin McKinley is an accomplished author; her characters all have an authentic voice. This means that when she sets out to write a gawky, self-centered, inarticulate teenage boy's stream-of-consciousness tale, that's exactly what you get. Some of the sentences are so long, convoluted and full of parentheses and ellipses and side comments, that the reader loses track of where they began. Perhaps this makes Jake's narration more "authentic;" reading some high school kids' creative writing assignments would be authentic, too, though I don't wish to pay for the privilege. There is a limit to the number of times most readers wish to encounter amusingly confused pronouns, the word "duh!" and pseudo teen-isms such as "diafreakingbolical."
The story covers about 10 years of time, and the most interesting stuff is the last six, which is condensed into a sort of flat, monotone flashback in the last 70 pages. Almost completely missing was the lyrical prose of McKinley's other stories. Since the book is essentially Jake's journal, and nearly all of that is a prose description of his efforts to save a young dragon, there is practically no sense of any other human presence. There is no conversation in the book that lasts more than about 4 sentences, so the reader has no way to understand any of the people in the book other than through Jake's eyes, and his changing feelings about them are more statements of fact than character development.
The dragon "people" are the exception to this--dragon characters are quite well fleshed out and--forgive the word--humanized. There are pages of description of what a dragon might be thinking and doing while interacting with Jake, sometimes to the detriment of the story. For example, at one point the reader learns that a dragon is going to be arriving. It does, and the action moves to another part of Smokehill, where something very important happens. In Jake-speak, the arrival of the dragon takes seven pages, and the journey takes two. The important event, actually the only event of real interest to the reader and the most important to the plot, takes one!
Jake's enthusiasm for dragons, to pretty much the exclusion of the rest of the world, is compelling, and at times it's enough to overcome the shortcomings of the way in which the story is being told. It's a window into the head of an obsessed scientist, who cares for little outside his field, and is fairly contemptuous of anyone who isn't interested, and even more contemptuous of anyone who is interested, but less knowledgeable than he is. Ultimately, the book reads like an anthropology text written by an enthusiastic 15 year-old. Only the fact that it was a "dragonology" text kept me reading to the end.”
Turrean wrote this review Tuesday, August 5 2008.
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