An ancient Chinese celestial dragon–unearthed in the frozen mountains of Mongolia, miraculously survives and looks to locate a twelve year old girl whose the key to fighting the demons that chased him out of his kingdom, and to find his female mate.
Review:
Isabella has always been a bit different. She and her brother Kaelyn have an interesting life, but they love it. When their mother passes away, Isabella and Kaelyn go to live with their Uncle Titus. Isabella is also given an amulet by her mother who tells Isabella to never take it off. Isabella soon begins having strange dreams about dragons and demons. The demons become reality one night though, so Isabella and her family know they need to take control of the situation. Isabella will discover her destiny in the form of an ancient dragon, Tianlong. The ensuing adventure will take Isabella and her family to Mongolia in search of Tianlong's mate. Between the humans and the demons though, this won't be an easy journey.
So normally I kind of gloss over technical issues with the writing when I review books. I don't expect perfection, particularly with self-published books or smaller publishers who may not have the resources. However, in this case the issues were too large to ignore. This book could have really used a pass or two by an editor. Verb tenses were never consistent, punctuation seemed randomly sprinkled about, and wrong or misspelled words abounded. The problem with this is that it made the story very hard to follow at times. Sometimes the book read like a screenplay, with ideas and events that probably should have been conveyed through dialogue were written like stage directions. I just felt like even your average beta reader would have cleaned up a lot of these problems and made a much more coherent story.
On to happier topics like the plot. There were some very interesting things in this book. I loved that the story focused so much on Asia. It was a nice change from the usual Westernized fantasy stories. I also loved, loved having so many persons of color in one story. How great is it to have a strong, independent girl of so many different ethnicities and races? Isabella's relationships with her family members were very sweet. They all relied on each other so much, but they were still able to have fun while supporting each other. I also really enjoyed that Tianlong had a personality. Humanizing the dragon as it were was a very smart move. It allowed me to relate to Tianlong more. Overall this is a very technically flawed book, but it has the potential to be a great story.
Book provided for review.
1 comment:
Seems interesting, but also needs some editing it looks like!
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