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Bitterwood | Rating | |
| D | |||
| James Maxey | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| N/A | N/A | ||
The world is ruled by dragons, humanity barely more than slaves. Bitterwood was a mere peasant until the dragon king Albekizan destroyed his village, and his family with it. Now he is humanity's greatest hero and dragonkind's boogey monster. But when Bitterwood kills the king's son and heir apparent, he may have gone too far. For now Albekizan is bent not on keeping humanity beneath his heel; he wants all of humanity dead! If anyone is to survive the dragons' wrath, Bitterwood is going to have to change his cause, from eternal vengence to freedom fighter — if he can find it in himself to do so.
It becomes obvious fairly quickly that this is a fallen Earth we're looking at. And it's confirmed in almost as many words a quarter of the way through the book. All right, fair enough. But that raises a good many questions of its own. There's the obvious, of course: where did the dragons come from, and how dis they get here, and why? And some of the logic these questions led me down make no sense whatsoever.
How, for instance, did dragons overthrow a modern humanity with its guns and missiles and and machinery, when they can be killed by knives and arrows? And how can it have possibly happened so long ago that the very idea that there was a previous culture on the planet, run by humans, is merely a theory of a few more philosophically-minded dragons? Yet, at the same time, the roads are in good — or at least decent — shape, cracked and crumbling but not ruined and overgrown. Rome was two thousand years ago and we still remember it. Five thousand years is the absolute minimum time I can imagine it to take the long-lived dragons to forget about advanced humans, and by then concrete and asphault would be ruins well on their way to being fully absorbed back into the earth.
Even if you disagree over how ling it would take a modern world to crumble away, it still wouldn't be in as good a shape as it is described here. Not if dragons had forgotten their origins. Yet if the roads were in even reasonably good shape, the dragons would recall — in story and legend, if nothing else — the state of humanity when first encountered. And human cities would also remain in good enough condition that a previous civilization's existence would be a sure fact, not conjecture that most dragons scoff at. There mifgr be debate over whether it was a human civilization or some third race's, but its existence would not be in doubt.
The only viable alternative is that dragons arrived after the fall of man. But while that fills several holes, it fails to explain why even humans have forgotten their past. One thousand years is mentioned a few times as the length of time dragons have enslaved humanity, or the time since human civilization ended, but even if the dragons didn't care to remember humans certainly would — Rome once again standing as proof.
But this is a story about freedom and war and looming genocide — not one of discovery. Do these questions, or their answers, really matter? The answer is, no, not really. So they can perhaps be ignored or dismissed, though for the life of me I personally was unable to do so.
What those questions did, however, was put me in an unforgiving mood. The logical flaws I perceived in the setting made me look for other flaws as well. And I found them. Many of the characters are extremely unappealing, people I am not interested in following though a story, much less winning in the end. And not only dragond fall into that category. Bitterwood's cold methodology renders him savage. It is one thing to cheer on a rebel, but several times he crosses the line to murderer. Jandra remains unbelievably — literally so — human of mind and attitude for a young woman who was raised from infancy in the dragons' court. Too, she is melodramatic, romantic, and rebellious, something even her gentle emntor and owner would have been hard-pressed to tolerate. She need not be meek, but her attitude just did not fit. Then, of course, there are the villains of the piece, who are supposed to be unlikable. Maxey pulled that off well enough, but it left me with nobody to cheer for that I really wanted to see come out ahead.
It also made me reluctant to accept explanations when they finally came. They felt unsatisfactory, like contrived attempts to explain away errors when not having the problems in the first place would have been a neater proposition. Change a few personalities slightly, change a few descriptions and lines of dialogue, and all those explanations would have felt like mysteries revealed instead of excuses.
The story, I will grant, isn't too bad. The bit on the back cover, about the subject matter aving a certain "resonance in our own troubled times" is hyperbole, though, unless you live in Africa or southern Asia, but the plot kind of works. The tale of the fruits of hatred and opression — from both sides — makes for interesting reading. That is, if you can get past the unsubtle characters and a setting that is difficult to believe in.
But as for myself, I couldn't quite manage it. By the point explanations started coming, my suspension of disbelief was shattered beyond repair. It is possible rereading this might change my mind somewhat, now that I know the backstory right from the start. But if it's that important that the setting's history be known at the beginning, the author rightly should have found a way to include it there. Or made it so that his non-error doesn't feel like an error, at least. But for two-thirds of the book, I felt that however good the plot itself might have been, if the setting was poked just a little too hard it would collapse in a heap of illogic and contradictions. And for me, exactly that happened well before it received the extra support it needed to withstand my scrutiny.
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