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Dragon Death | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Gael Baudino | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Dragonsword | Dragonsword, Duel of Dragons, Dragon Death | ||
Things are getting pretty bad. Because Suzanne Helling - aka Aluozon Dragonmaster - and the rest did not return within the specified time, Kings Cvinthil and Darham are heading to Vaylle to make war, leaving a duplicitous and incredibly powerful Helwych to assist the queen in rule. Alouzon's party is well away from the coast, unable to correct the wizard's claims of their deaths, and Alouzon herself has been wisked back to LA, still as Gryylthian warrior rather than her earhly self. She must return to Gryylth fast to correct the errors, right the wrongs, and hopefully stop the Specter that is the force behind it all. If she fails, Gryylth will remain, but it just might be a barren wasteland.
Nearly all of the problems I had with the previous book return in this one. The only change is that the Specter makes slightly more sense, thanks to an explanation of what he represents. But even if he is the personification of Suzanne's view of war and death, and not the faceless soldiers who are doing the deeds, it still rings out of tune. The Circle and the Tree balanced each other in Solomon's mind; what is balancing the Specter? Besides, the explicit explanation comes very late in the novel, by which time readers have either long since been lost due to lack of exposition or will have decided it doesn't matter or they don't care. It should have come, it needed to come, much earlier than did.
The others remain essentially unchanged. There is still the depressing hopelessness of a society defended with swords and spears confronted by modern weapons. There is still the foolishness of a war with no purpose but destruction. And added to it all is how, thanks to a spell cast by Helwych, most of Gryylth's forces are stuck away from the homes being ravaged by the Specter and his forces, and more than half the book consists of the good guys doing nothing but treading narrational water - just existing. The climax involves a detour of a great many people through downtown LA, a trip that, to say the least, I had some real problems with even with magic aiding the affair. And the solution to all the problems at the end are solved thanks literally to a deus ex machina, minus the machina.
For a while I thought this would be a better book than Duel of Dragons. The story in the first quarter or so is not too bad, and significantly more understandable than was the second book's. But in the end, there were just as many problems, just in a different form.
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