The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads 

The Dragon Has Some Complaints by John Wiswell

This is a stand-alone fantasy set in a secondary world with dragons and some steampunk elements. The main human city is a remarkable place hanging in the air, with inclusive society and tame dragons. It has been at war for a long time with a totalitarian nation that wants to subjugate it. The dragons are divided to wild dragons who live in a large hive, though each a bit solitary, and those tamed by humans of the winged city for their war. The first look down on the latter and both look down on humans.

The main character is Garrodigh, an ancient three-headed wild dragon. He used to have four heads, but one of the heads died as a casualty of the war. It has left the dragon otherwise incapacitated too, so he can’t fly or move well, and he doesn’t remember his past properly either. But he knows he’s been a great dragon. Other wild dragons disagree and shun him as a human sympathizer, which he can’t understand.

Garrodigh is a delightful protagonist. Each head has a different personality. The narrator is Centerhead who holds himself to be the most rational of the three, though Lefthead that’s now gone used to be the most intelligent. Bottomhead is a bit simple and straightforward, and cares more about food than anything else. Upperhead believes he’s a human who is only suffering from a delusion of being a three-headed dragon.

Yet another battle injures Garrodigh again. But this time Centerhead has a plan. Since humans take good care of their dragons and never leave them behind, he’ll pretend to be a tame dragon, wait until the humans have healed him, and then destroy the humans. The plan works perfectly. Up until he’s assigned a rider who turns out to be nothing Garrodigh could imagine.

Rania is one of the many refugees fled from the totalitarian society for the free country of the Winged City where people can be who they are, in her case a free spirit who believes in auras, being helpful and understanding, and protecting those she loves. But she too is shunned by her society for a reason Garrodigh cannot fathom.

Little by little, the two strike a friendship, much to Garrodigh’s bewilderment. He tries to understand her and her troubles, like her romantic life, which seems to consist of one-night stands. But there’s also heartbreak in form of a childhood friend who’s turned a cold shoulder on her. And as he learns to care for her, he also wants to defend the city against the enemy. The enemy has a new, bewildering weapon that almost destroys the city. As Garrodigh and Rania go to investigate, they discover a great secret and almost die destroying the weapon.

This was a good story. The focus was on Garrodigh and his struggle with understanding humans and himself. There’s healing and learning, grief and heartfelt moments. All three of Garrodigh’s personalities are delightful and different, and they all grow as individuals and as a whole. Rania wasn’t equally interesting, and she mostly served as an object of observation for Garrodigh. The society was understanding and inclusive, but not everyone was a nice person, which Rania learns first-hand.

I have complaints too though. I would’ve wanted there to be other dragon characters. There were plenty of dragons, but he doesn’t form friendships with any of them and they barely feature. Garrodigh is the only tame dragon who talks, and they shun him as much as the wild dragons did. I would’ve liked there to be a parallel story for him that there is for Rania of being accepted by his own kind. The story is also too long, with too much time and focus spent on Rania’s love life, which wasn’t all that interesting.

There were also moments that took me out of the story. Garrodigh occasionally knows very human concepts, while other times he’s completely clueless. Like he knows what apothecary smells like and what a trans man is. The latter has meaning for the worldbuilding—though it should’ve had more meaning for the story as well, as now it was more of a gimmick—but it would’ve made more sense if it were explained to him by humans.

This is described as a cozy fantasy, but it’s not completely so. There’s the war, with everything it entails, like death and bad injuries, and nasty people who treat others badly. Garrodigh eats people. But it has a wholesome core, growth and understanding. As long as the reader doesn’t expect things to be perfect and nice, it’s a delightful read, with Garrodigh making every scene worthwhile.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis: review

5/5 stars on Goodreads

Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis

Dreadful is a delightful debut novel by Caitlin Rozakis. It’s set in a rather embarrassing castle of Dread Lord Gavrax, an evil wizard who has lost his memory. He has no recollection of his past, let alone that morning, which turns out to be very problematic. Because his past self has made some plans.

Gav, as he decides to call himself, is middle-aged and not very successful dark wizard or respected among his peers, as he soon discovers. But he’s feared by his goblin staff, which embarrasses him greatly. He’s also embarrassed by his choice in décor and clothing. But he soon finds out Dread Lord is only as dreaded as he appears.

He seems to have some anger management issues he doesn’t know the roots of, but which make him want to burn people around him to death, something he struggles to overcome. He also has a village to manage that is very poor thanks to his past self’s lousy decisions, which he decides to rectify. And worst of all, he has a princess in his dungeon.

His past self has teamed with other dark wizards for something nefarious he doesn’t remember. It involves the princess that his current self has come to like and respect quite a lot. So, it’s up to him to rescue her or failing that, she’ll have to rescue herself. Easier said than done when heroes from all over the kingdom are rushing to her rescue by trying to kill him, and dark wizards more powerful than him are determined to stop him.

This was a fun story with all sorts of shenanigans that kept me guessing to the end. Gav stumbles in and out of problems that are mostly his past self’s making, with rather surprising results. Along the way, he comes to learn a lot about his goblin staff and women, whom he suspects his old self had no respect for. He’s earnest about his desire to change for the better, but it’s not easy. And all the while he fears that if he gets his memories back, he’ll revert to his old evil self.

Gav is rather endearing in his quest for redemption. It isn’t easy and involves a lot of soul searching and some hard conversations with the princess who holds him accountable for his past self. His constant commentary about women’s looks and bodies became a bit off-putting at some point though, as if they only exist to be looked at despite his attempts to see them as people with agency. His friendship with the princess is fairly one-sided, it seemed, and she never quite becomes what she could be. The goblin staff, on the other hand, is delightful in their earnest willingness to help him change.

The ending is good and, since this appears to be a stand-alone, conclusive. Gav rises to the occasion in a manner I didn’t see happening at the beginning of the book, and the story leaves everyone in a better place. All in all, a good story of friendship and redemption that will delight me for a long time.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler: review

5/5 stars on Goodreads

How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler

I’ve been waiting for a good western take on Asian isekai genre for so long that I eventually had to write one myself. It’s such a popular genre in Asia that it’s surprising it hasn’t taken in the west. The few western versions that I’ve read have tried to imitate the originals, but they lack the charm and whimsy. But now there’s How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying by Django Wexler. It takes the idea of isekai and makes it thoroughly its own.

For those not familiar with the term, in isekai light novels and mangas a person from the modern world is transported to a secondary world, a book, game or fantasy world, either bodily or as a character there, and has to adapt to a new reality. Sometimes there’s a time loop element where the character starts over every time they die. Sometimes their life is improved by the change, sometimes they set out to make the changes themself with the knowledge they have.

Davi is from the modern-day US, she thinks. She doesn’t quite remember anymore, because she’s been in a fantasy world for a better part of a millennium. She was brought there by a wizard as the saviour of the humans from the Dark Lord, and has died hundreds of times in the service of the Kingdom, only to return to the moment she arrived to this word to start again.

Now she’s had enough. Clearly, she isn’t the saviour, because she hasn’t managed to save the Kingdom in all this time. It’s time to switch teams to the winning side. She’ll become the Dark Lord. Easier said than done, because Dark Lords aren’t human. They’re wilder: orcs, werewolves, snake people and other humanoid beasts that don’t look at all like human. But she has an ace in her sleeve. She can pass as a wilder the way humans can’t.

It takes several efforts—and deaths—to get the ball rolling. She recruits a small band of orcs and sets out to build herself a horde to attend a convocation where they choose the next Dark Lord. The way is difficult, geographically and politically, but she prevails, liberating the oppressed and growing her army as she goes—mostly accidentally. And the farther she advances, the more important it becomes that she doesn’t die. Because then everything will reset and she’ll have to start again, and the events have been so fantastical that she couldn’t possibly recreate them again.

But the possibility of starting over is there. Until it isn’t.

This was a great start to a series. Davi is a fairly typical sarcastic UF heroine who runs a constant commentary (in footnotes, which was a tad difficult in an ebook) and references pop culture she really shouldn’t remember, as she doesn’t even remember where she’s from. She’s probably not entirely sane, but who would be after being tortured to death several hundred times, but she’s clever and tenacious. However, part of her grit comes from the knowledge that she can just give up and start again. Until she can’t. The paradigm change is hard on her, but she’s not alone to handle it.

In her quest to become the Dark Lord, Davi accidentally builds herself a family. They’re supposed to be minions, but they’re friends and lovers (she’s permanently horny). The side-characters remain a little distant, as Davi is very self-absorbed in her narrative, but they’re nice and more humane than the humans she’s tried to save all these centuries.

The book is a bit too long though. It’s heavy reading with all the gore and commentary, and the plot advances slowly. Part of the charm of light novels is their shorter length and longer series that don’t really mind pesky things like story arcs. It might’ve worked here too, if it hadn’t been necessary to bring the first book to a turning point to suit western traditions. Now it took me surprisingly long to wade it through to the end.

Ending isn’t a cliffhanger, but it puts Davi on crossroads in her quest. It’ll be interesting to see how she’ll handle the turn her life has taken.

I received a free copy from Edelweiss in exchange for an honest review.

The Monster MASH by Angie Fox: review

2/5 stars on Goodreads

The Monster MASH by Angie Fox

I’ve long meant to read Angie Fox’s comedic fantasies, and so I was eager to get my hands in The Monster MASH when I spotted it on NetGalley, and was thrilled to have an early review copy. The premise promised the same than the movie MASH and the subsequent TV series had, but with gods and supernatural entities: an endless war told from the point of view of the hospital staff that have no personal interest in the outcome, but who have no way of escaping, so they express their frustration with disobedience, disrespect and endless pranks. What was delivered was only a vague resemblance of that, and I’m afraid the book didn’t work for me at all.

The main character, Dr Petra Robichaud, has worked seven years on the front lines of a war between gods, taking care of injured gods, demigods and heroes. She’s been drafted against her will and she can only get out when she dies. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for her, nor does it affect her actions. She can see ghosts, which is apparently a big no-no among the gods, and might indicate she has a role to play in a prophecy that ends the war. The other main character is Galen, a demigod warrior who ends up on her operating table. He’s absolutely determined to see the prophecy to come to pass, though I never quite understood why now, when he’s been fighting for centuries already. He was overbearing and annoying, and as a love interest, a great disappointment.

This was a first person narrative and Petra the only point of view character. Problem for me was that I didn’t like her at all. She’s over forty, experienced trauma doctor and, according to her friends, a cynic—not a surprise when one has spent years at war—yet she behaved like a schoolgirl, positively dying of embarrassment every time someone teased her of her alleged relationship with Galen. She didn’t take any charge of her life or have proper insight in herself. Her interactions with Galen were those of a teenager with her first crush, and consisted mostly of denial. There was no discernible reason that I could find why she nonetheless fell in love with him. I found her annoying, inconsistent and cowardly, and could only marvel when other characters described her as the opposite.

Other characters were odd and annoying too. Galen was the worst, a cardboard figure that showed up to order Petra around or save her. Other characters seemed to like him, but readers weren’t invited in their interactions and so can’t judge for themselves. The rest of the cast are oddities that were probably meant to be the comedic relief, but since they never did anything funny and their communications with Petra were mostly snarky, they didn’t come across as such. The only character I liked was the commander, but he had a fairly minor role.

But it’s not just my personal preferences that made Petra an unsatisfying main character. She had no agency. She didn’t influence the plot in any way at any point. She made no attempt to investigate or influence the prophecy concerning her—though apparently she had tried before the book began—and her only act of defiance was denying it had anything to do with her. There were some action scenes where she was usually saved by Galen, and although they had impact on the outcome of the story, they were accidental on her part. In the end, she watched the story unfold on TV. I kid you not.

However, what really made the book fail was that it had no plot. All the interesting bits had happened before it began: Petra’s fiancé had died in the war between gods; she had been drafted to the opposite side, learned about the prophecy and acted on it with bad consequences for her. All this was revealed to the reader in due, and not so due, course, but it didn’t have any impact on the plot or Petra’s actions, apart from her trying to deny her role in the prophecy.

The book has an inciting incident that throws Petra and Galen together. After that, half the book is spent with Petra dragging her heels about the prophecy. Absolutely nothing happens to advance the non-existent plot. She hangs around with her friends, does some hospital stuff, and goes back and forth with Galen whilst apparently falling in love with him at some point too. After the half point, the prophecy suddenly kicks in and we’re following it on TV where Petra learns how it’s supposed to unfold. There are some action scenes that confirm it, and then the prophecy is fulfilled. We watch it on the side-lines. Petra has no part in it. Undying love is declared. The end.

All in all, the book was unfunny, boring and unromantic. It failed in every level that I expect from a comedic fantasy. There’s an afterword from the author where she says this is a revised version from an earlier one where she couldn’t follow her vision for the book. Without reading the original version, I’m inclined to think that she should’ve let it be. This is a start for a series, but needless to say, I’m not going to continue with it.

The Part about the Dragon Was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson: review

4/5 stars on Goodreads

The Part about the Dragon Was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson

The long title is pretty descriptive of the kind of book this is. The Part about the Dragon Was (Mostly) True, Heloise the Bard 1, by Sean Gibson is a comedic fantasy that relies heavily on verbal acrobatics. It’s told by Heloise the Bard (or was it Heloise the Beautiful, as she is very fond of reminding the readers), a half-elf bard (I don’t remember what the other half was) who sets out to give the reader a true account of what went down with the red dragon (the false account of which she is also responsible of.)

We follow an odd-ball team of would-be adventurers who want to make name for themselves by killing the dragon (though they probably should’ve been taking care of the mad wizard they accidentally unleashed), lured there by Heloise’s somewhat inflated promises of the dragon’s gold. There’s a half-dwarf, half-halfling street magician (I’m sorry, prestidigitator), an elf archer (though aren’t they all), a rock giant who’s both slow and sweet, and a wizard who belongs to a race that look like rats. Heloise joins them to be able to tell their story accurately (to the readers anyway; the tavern folk get the official version because it pays better). They’re not exactly a seamless and accomplished team, but they’re getting (mostly) there.

This was a fun book, but not quite laugh-out-loud funny; clever rather than comedic. It’s a bit slow read too. Heloise has a tendency to go off on a tangent (or a tangent’s tangent) in practically every paragraph and I had to read everything twice to remember what the actual sentence was about. Moreover, there are two stories going side by side, the official one and the truth, so the plot takes forever to get to the point. After a while, I began to skip the official accounts that were helpfully in italics. They weren’t as interesting as the truth anyway. But despite the slowness and the tangents (or maybe because of the tangents, as the cleverest bits tended to be there), this was a pleasurable read where the characters turned out to be something other than their stereotypes and the truth was stranger than—well, I’ll let you find out yourselves.

I received a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.