TITLE: Dragon’s Winter
AUTHOR: Elizabeth A Lynn
GENRE: Fantasy
PUBLISHED: 01/04/1997
RATING: ★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: N/A
Review: Dragon’s Winter is dated. Or maybe Lynn’s style just isn’t for me, because after two weeks and 20% in, I have to officially declare this one a DNF.
I’m a bookaholic, and I suffer from abibliophobia. There are currently over 250 books waiting on my TBR pile. 20% is the absolute max I will give an ebook to hook me in: if you can’t do that with a fifth of your book, you have failed and will be relegated to the DNF bin. I don’t have the time to read books I don’t enjoy, and Dragon’s Winter, I’m sorry to say, I definitely did not enjoy.
It should have been excellent: it’s a secondary-world fantasy, in a quasi-Medieval period wherein some people have the ability to change into animals. Just one animal (or bird) per person. The story revolves around the Atani family, one of whom in each generation is Dragon-born and grows up to rule over the land. Karadur is the Dragon-born of this generation, while his twin, Tenjiro, grows up to learn sorcery instead. At the very beginning of the story, Tenjiro takes his revenge (for not being the Dragon-born twin? As though that’s anyone’s fault) on his brother by stealing the talisman Karadur needs to change forms, and kidnapping Karadur’s (male) lover. Tenjiro disappears with both treasures, leaving Karadur to rule over his realm in only his human form.
There is probably more to the story than that. But all of the above happens in the first chapter, and afterwards we are relegated with the daily minutiae of living in a village below Karadur’s castle, where we meet various villagers and a stranger who has moved in among them, eventually marries one of the village women, and reveals himself as able to turn into a wolf. Who may be in the area to investigate Karadur and why he has not yet shapeshifted. It wasn’t completely clear, and it certainly wasn’t very interesting.
And that’s really the problem. Lynn’s style is very, very simplistic – I would even call it bare.
Azil walked to Karadur, and knelt. He lifted the shimmering band with both hands, wincing as he did so, put it in the box, and shut the lid. Karadur’s eyelids opened. With a harsh sound, he tried to sit upright. “Go!” Tenjiro said. Azil went out the door. Tenjiro said two words. A look of strain crossed his face.
I love my fantasy with lots of world-building and lots of description: I want to know all about the magic and I want lots of pretty things to look at. This may make me shallow; it certainly means that Dragon’s Winter is not for me, with its two-dimensional characters, it’s shaky plot, and the long stretches of nothingness – it reads more like an instruction manual or history textbook than a novel.
In my opinion Dragon’s Winter is heavily dated, and not even the inclusion of a (n almost entirely off-screen) gay romance could make me push through any more of this book. I simply fail to care about any of it: not the characters, not Karadur’s plight, and certainly not the laughably pathetic ‘evil force’ infecting Tenjiro to use him for its own ends. Possibly this kind of story was relatively new when Lynn first wrote it, but in the years since we have seen literally thousands of similar variations, and there’s nothing about Dragon’s Winter to make it stand out.
If you want shape-changing dragons, look for Alan Troop’s The Dragon DelaSangre. If you want domestic fantasy, try Jo Walton’s Lifelode or Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. But give this one a miss.