Dragonking of Mystara

by Thorarinn Gunnarsson

Reviewed by Ruby

Five years after the ending of the first book, Thelvyn is now the Dragonlord and advisor to the king of the Flaem race; he also holds the honour of keeping peace with the dragons. That in itself is difficult to do on a normal day and it is now much worse as an ancient artifact of the dragons has been stolen.  The dragons are infuriated and will stop at nothing to get it back. At first, they attack the Alphatians, believing they have stolen it and the Flaem couldn't be happier, because the Alphatians and the Flaem are bitter enemies. So the Flaem decide it is the perfect time to go to war with the Alphatians and get rid of them once and for all.

Now this is where I started losing interest, because there are pages and pages and pages of nothing! Just exposition, no action for the longest time and then there is a random assassination attempt on Thelvyn and then more exposition, then something about renegade dragons followed by even more exposition and suddenly there is a war between the dragons and everybody except Alphatia.

And the ending was completely weird. I'm not going to go into details but someone solved everyone's problems by showing up at the last minute and saying some magic words. If that person had done that at the beginning I wouldn't have spent over a month trying to read the crappy book. Seriously this was awful, there is no way in hell I am reading the third one.

There was just no life to this story. There are close to 400 pages in this book, most of which are people talking, and somehow the author fails to invoke one single human emotion (except boredom that is). For example, at one point there are three women who supposedly all have feelings for Thelvyn and I didn't buy any of it for even a second.  Even the 'shock' surprises weren't surprises because although they were news to the characters, us -the readers- already had the informafation revealed to us two chapters before.

Also, why does the map in the front of the book only have like half of the cities that were mentioned in the book on it? Why? How hard is it, if you write a book with a bunch of cities in it, to make sure that those cities are actually on the freaking map!? Honestly! That drives me nuts.

Geez, I'm just glad that's over.

Grade: F