Julia Wilson

Character: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Plot: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Prose: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

World: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

OVERALL: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

I didn’t like this one at all, folks 😔🙌 After the first few chapters I was thinking this might be a two-star read, but as the book went on and I started to have more problems with it, I had to adjust my rating. This book didn’t work for me at all, and no one’s sadder about it than me.

If you want a digestible, bloody, dragon rider fantasy adventure, Dragon Rider might be right up your alley. To quickly clear the air too, Fourth Wing comes up a lot in the marketing as Dragon Rider seems to be targeting the audience that wanted a darker, less romance-heavy slant to Fourth Wing, but it’s much closer to Eragon than Fourth Wing; the only thing the books have in common are human-dragon bonded partnerships. I’d recommend Dragon Rider more to 1) those who haven’t read a huge amount of what I’ll call “traditional” adult fantasy (i.e., not Romantasy), 2) people who liked The Inheritance Cycle and are searching for more of the same, and 3) people who want to venture into adult fantasy spaces from YA ones and like the gritty aesthetics of Game of Thrones. I know I wanted the bite, edge, and smarts of Thrones, which Dragon Rider clearly takes large inspiration from, but didn’t find here.

Dragon Rider is Taran Matharu’s first adult book. His previous YA books have been hugely successful, and I was excited to see how he would transition to the adult market as hey, that’s the one I know best and like the most. But unfortunately, my familiarity with the genre seems to have hindered more than helped. I’ve seen most of the ideas in this book done better elsewhere, and many of my issues can be summed up as “YA logic, adult language and situations”, which creates a jarring contrast. It desperately wants to have that adult complexity, which it will remind you of by throwing blood, guts, viscera, swearing, and nudity and sex at you willy nilly, but Matharu doesn’t yet have the ability to execute the vision I think he was aiming for. I constantly found myself thinking, “no real human person would act like this” as we learnt more of how Jai and his brothers are treated as hostages, people get away with the most insane things with nary a shrug, warnings of conspiracies are constantly ignored or given very low priority, plans succeed because of flimsy happenstance rather than actual effort, and no one is capable of thinking beyond the next couple of hours. I went from baffled, to annoyed, to tired as stuff just kept happening because plot.

Our protagonist is Jai, son of a king who fought and lost against the aggressively expanding Sabine Empire. Jai and his elder brothers were taken as hostages by the empire as children, with eyes towards reconciliation and friendship with the defeated Steppefolk once the eldest comes of age and can return to rule them. As the third son, Jai is tasked with caring for the elderly once-emperor who killed his father.

More than a decade after his father’s death, Jai is seventeen, and a marriage is being arranged between the Sabine and Dansk royal families. The Dansk (which is just Danish for … Danish) are a pop culture Viking/fantasy barbarian peoples who form soulbonds with dragons, and the alliance will not only bring peace to the empire, but give it the power of dragons. This seems like a bad idea. Yet shenanigans are afoot, and this wedding might not go as smoothly as all parties are hoping.

Firstly, the pacing in this book is wack; like, I have not seen pacing this bad in a long time. Too much time is spent on unimportant events so everything feels lopsided and extremely slow. I felt like I read a really, really long first act, a really flat second act, and then a third act that I guess? It sure sprung in from the off-screen. The transition being “random poison from off-screen go!” is half-confusing, half-hilarious because it just happens with no build-up. I’m left scratching my head wondering where the editing team was for this one. The first third involves political machinations and scheming around this wedding and alliance, which leads to the coup described in the blurb (yes, it takes 1/3rd of the book to arrive at the inciting incident!), after which Jai escapes with the dragon egg that later hatches after he literally stumbles over it on his way out the door. What happened to that stealing the blurb mentioned? See: stuff just happening because. I wouldn’t mind this pacing so much if the political machinations were interesting enough to make up for it, but they’re not. It’s a very generic power grab by the comically evil prince to take the throne for reasons of power and empire expansion, but he doesn’t seem to have a solid plan beyond the Underpants Gnomes Step 1: Coup, Step 2: ???, Step 3: Profit! model (not to mention his timing of this coup is Extremely Illogical and Dumb). The people who follow him don’t have any solid reasons to help him either beyond being generically evil drones. The people who die in the coup only die because they sleepwalked into the entire affair; I mean, the warnings they get are met with the attitude of “hmm! Interesting! We shall consider what you said”, and then everyone is shocked when the coup happens. I wanted to shake everyone involved, but especially Jai. Telling one person there is a problem and then wiping your hands of it does not solve anything!

The aesthetics of Game of Thrones, but not much of the smarts, as it doesn’t seem to understand why its violence and sex works so well. Instead, it has only co-opted its imagery, which is a common trap Thrones inspired works fall into.

Speaking of smarts, Jai, frankly put, is an idiot of colossal proportions. He constantly makes the wrong decisions, to which the book is oblivious, and often fails to put two and two together that by the time he does figure out the answers to proposed questions, you the reader have been shouting those answers at him for possibly hundreds of pages. Aside from fumbling his way through a plot that was happening to him, I also found him to be an inconsistent character. One example of this relates to the very first page. He’s described as “hating” the old emperor Leonid because the guy killed his father (understandable), and Jai doesn’t relish his position of having to be this elderly man’s carer, but after the coup shenanigans happen, Jai says he loved Leonid like a father-figure. So like … which is it?

The rest of the cast can be neatly slotted into stereotypical archetypes. Not only do we have the cruel and ambitiously evil prince, but the corrupt and comically evil paladin, the icy and beautiful not-like-other-girls warrior princess, the gruffly drunk-but-competant mentor who was once a warrior like the main character, etc. I know these archetypes, not these characters, and as such I quickly grew tired of them. The situations these characters find themselves in are convoluted so, for example, exposition can be delivered and worldbuilding shown off. Which is incredibly distracting? I don’t see why any sane person would drag another on a city-wide tour just to throw them off a tower to kill them when they could, instead, just take the guy around the back wall and stab him. Your orders were just to kill him, dude. Just kill him. Please.

You can say fuck and cunt as many times as you want, kill babies and have Red Weddings galore, and worldbuild to your heart’s content, but it won’t make the book adult when the story’s conflict is firmly rooted in “and then and then and then” logic, tired stock characters, and almost no changing dynamics, rather than “therefore, but” logic supported by rounded characters with beefing personalities.

Following the daring escape from the palace, Jai, and now the baby dragon Winter, run about for a bit until they find not-like-other-girls Frida and go through a training and travelling montage that reminded me of an RPG with its talk of how to acquire mana and levelling up (which takes up another third of the book; as mentioned above, the pacing is a huge issue, because this should have all happened in the first third) before falling into an action climax that I didn’t much care about the outcome of. The book ends with an invite to tune in next time, but I will not be tuning in next time, I’m sorry to say.

But one of the biggest story sins Dragon Rider committed was how it bent over backwards to keep Jai as the protagonist when it should have been Frida, as all of the important beats affect her more than him. As a non-spoiler explainer, there were several points where it made more sense for Frida to do things that she just doesn’t so stuff can happen to her for Jai to deal with. And for those of you hunting for spoilers, I mean things like Frida not doing enough with the warning Jai gives her about the coup just so the coup can happen, her getting over her dragon’s death extremely quickly so Jai can spend more of the narration bonding with Winter, and hiding the soulgem in her mouth for days only to give it to Jai so he can become a more powerful Soulbound when she could have swallowed it before they arrived at the prison camp and so avoided the whole thing. If anything, Jai is random collateral swept up in a story about Frida.

In summary: Dragon Rider will probably be a miss if you’re a fantasy veteran. The book relies on common tropes that are played straight, has the bark of Thrones but not the bite, and there are simply more challenging books out there to read. If you’re new to the genre, or not as demanding of it as me, you’ll probably get more out of this book that I did.

I’m still hunting for the book that will be able to scratch my Eragon itch, as unfortunately it was not this one. Maybe I’ll give Of Blood and Fire another shot….

Footnote: I have one more personal gripe that I couldn’t really fit in above. I found the short chapters aggravating. Whole scenes would be split into three chapters for no reason. Why was this decision made? I feel like this extends from the author’s Wattpad days, so I just … You know you’re allowed to write chapters that are more than four pages long, right? You’re trad publishing, you’re not following an update schedule. Just make the scene into one chapter. Please. And thank you.

This book was one big giant yes.

I'd had my eye on this book for several months before it came out and was lucky to get a copy through work. And, to bring back a tired turn of phrase in relation to this book, well, I ate it up. I loved the characters, I loved the tangle of motivations going on throughout the book, and I loved the Gene Wolfe inspired asides and insights.

She could tell them about the relief that alcohol brought as the months had dragged on; about the guilt-ridden dreams, and the compass with Salem's picture that weighed heavier than chains. About all those nights standing over her son's sleeping form as she thought about smothering him, then stopping herself. About the discarded victims she'd carried, one by one by one to a slew of homeless shelters over the months.

But if Devon talked about any of that, then she'd have to talk about how you really could get used to anything, with enough time and motivation; how her crimes swiftly dwindled from horrific and extraordinary to a facet of her everyday reality.

She had worked out at some point that this was how the Easterbrooks conducted their trafficking without breaking a sweat; how the patriarchs overlooked the suffering and servitude of the mother-brides they destroyed; how humans could continue to exist in an infrastructure of misery. Trauma became routine, and cruelty mundane. Just life, innit.

The Families were not on her side. This realization struck Devon like a bellringer with a gong mallet, shaking her all the way through even as her lungs burned and her feet pounded the underbrush, nose full of the scent of evergreens and fresh snow. The Families were her blood relations, people she loved and had been loved by; her entire world. They were now her Great Enemy.

In fact, they always had been. However loving her childhood, her flesh was still theirs, her goods for the selling. Like pigs or chickens raised for the slaughter, she had developed affection for her keepers, and they for her. But that did not stop her from being consumed; pig farmers still chewed their bacon with enjoyment. Affection only made cruelty rueful.

Character: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

World: ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

OVERALL: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

I keep hoping that I’ll like at least one Romantasy book someday so I can participate in the hype, which feels very lonely at this point to be left out of, but this ain’t it, chief. Dear God, when will it be? Will the day ever come?!

Goodreads classifies two stars as “it was okay”, and that perfectly encapsulates my experience here. This book was thoroughly okay. Silver Under Nightfall tells the story of Remington “Remy” Pendergast, a vampire hunter called a “Reaper”, who has a difficult relationship with his famous and now crippled vampire hunter of a lord father. Remy is ostracised by his peers, often being accused of being part-vampire due to his very Blade-esque birth, and being the subject of ire of his father’s hated rival Lord Astonbury. To get bounties, Remy has been engaged in a years-long, not-so-secret sexual relationship with Astonbury’s wife, the Lady Giselle. But reports have been sweeping the kingdom of Aluria that a new breed of vampire is rising, far more deadly than those seen before, and tackling the problem are the vampires Lady Xiaodan Song and her fiancé, the Summer Lord Zidan Malekh, King of the Third Court. They invite Remy to uncover the source of this Rot with them, but defeating the Rot isn’t the only design the couple have on him (•̀⩊•́)

I thought going into this that if there’s any Romantasy book I would like, it’s going to be this one. I liked the first chapters, I love both of the Netflix Castlevania shows (this book was conceived as Castlevania fan fic), and Remy is the type of protagonist I’m such a softy for: an angsty, unloved noble son out to prove himself. But, to my dismay, I quickly discovered that this book was falling into the exact patterns that I’ve so disliked in other Romantasys. Is it so much to ask that a Romantasy book focuses more on the Fantasy side of the scale than the Romance side? Please?! Because dumb decisions keep getting made for the sake of the Romance and it drives me crazy!

I knew the book’s fic origins coming into it, but I did not expect to have to approach it like I would a fic. And by that I mean, Silver Under Nightfall feels like in order to fully understand what is going on, you need to have an understanding of how Castlevania’s world status quo works, and that you need to accept stuff is just gonna be like dat sometimes. The first warning bells that something was up were in the book’s approach to worldbuilding. An advantage of fan fic is writers and readers can jump into a story that already has base ingredients; you know who the characters are, and if it’s set within the same world as the original media, then you don’t have to worldbuild. If the fic is an alternate universe (AU), then light worldbuilding elements are often introduced to explain how Rey and Kylo Ren operate in this not-Galaxy Far, Far Away rather than in the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Cool? Cool.

Silver Under Nightfall is operating in this same, light understanding place where the characters who aren’t Remy aren’t particularly fleshed out beyond a couple of traits, and the worldbuilding is flimsy and handwavey. In other words, it’s written as “just go with how everything in the background works because you’re here for shipping”. Just go with how the worldbuilding works; just go with how society’s elite seem very casual and relaxed with how they interact with each other (and for that matter, how Zidan is king of the Third Court but leaves the running of it to everyone else so he can hang out in the Fourth Court what??); just go with how Remy’s ostracism works; just go with how vampires and humans have super sketchy, not-really-logical rules for their co-existence in this world (umm, hi, vampires drink human blood, and no one seems overtly concerned about this ever?); just go with how events like random monster attacks or battles suddenly happen in order to have a plot. Just go with it, okay? For the ships! This approach to the story only contributed to the fan fic feeling I got whilst reading, and it came to the point I was picturing and hearing the characters as Trevor and Sypha and Alucard and my God am I tired. I’m so tired.

I like Remy as a character. I like how his situation is set up with the circumstances of his birth, and how it as well as his relationships affect his professional and social standing, and the feelings that are born from it. It’s a great way to set up drama for when Xiaodan and Zidan come into his life and are able to offer balm to Remy’s soul and help with the Rot. Can Remy overcome the lifetime of prejudices stacked against him? How would his relationships with his father and Lady Giselle change after meeting Xiaodan and Zidan and offering his aid to save the people who fear and even hate him? Can Remy learn to accept and love himself despite everything he’s gone through? I was eager to see. Xiaodan and Zidan are the other two characters that flesh out the core thruple of the story. Xiaodan is fine I guess, and Zidan is just Alucard. Specifically S1 & 2 Alucard, but yeah.

I guess I’m always going to be a bad shipper though, because I was not very impressed when the characters were much more concerned about their hormones and who-used-to-be-fucking-who and now who-is-fucking-who rather than the gosh darn plague that is threatening the existence of the kingdom. Mutating, undying vampires are spreading throughout the kingdom? Hmm, that is a problem, but a more pressing concern is getting Remy to understand that Zidan is trying to flirt with him instead of kill him, according to the amount of words dedicated to each subject. How does elite society’s dynamics work, what with Remy being the only child of a rich and powerful man and therefore a valuable asset for politics in this feudal society? Eh ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ This must be a weird society for social politicking to not be important. I don’t even know what the nobility in this world are even for except to be vampire hunters, which like, is a weird career for them to all pick due to the presumably high mortality rate; wouldn’t there be mini power crisises all the time in this case?! Do those born to noble families have a choice to not be Reapers? Do they even do anything that requires them to govern as lords? Who knooows~

I’m also still not clear on what the dynamics of the humans and vampires in this world are, because it’s this situation where some vampire courts are feared by humans and some aren’t, despite vampires needing to drink human blood to survive, and why would an alliance even be on the table when one group actively need to prey on the other in order to exist? I don’t understand how vampire lore really works in this book; vampires are more akin to superhumans who are sometimes scared of silver and the sun if they’re too young. At around the 60% mark, I had to take my hands off the wheel and stop holding out hope that the book was going to become interested in exploring its worldbuilding in any kind of seriousness or tackle its pandemic-infection-Rot plot with the concern such a thing should warrant (we just had our own plague, we know how this works), and instead I had to approach the plot as a series of things happening to support the thruple getting together. Which I really didn’t want to do, but had to for my own dang sanity. Otherwise I would have ended up yelling what, why?? at the book more than I already was, which is just exhausting to think about. There was also a point where Remy tells Xiaodan and Zidan that he is twenty-three and entered his relationship with Giselle when he was fifteen, but apparently he’s only known Giselle for five years? 🤨 The maths ain’t mathing here.

I am really, really not the Romantasy target market, am I?

But with that all being said, here is my actual soapbox for the day and the reason I wanted to write this review in the first place: I have problems with the heavy-handed approach to Remy’s reaction to his abuse, specifically related to his views on romance and sex.

What I liked about it: Remy had to be told it was abuse, and the surprise he had because not only was he getting something out of it (sex and intelligence), but because there was some element of consent to it. I have no complaints about this. I really liked it. Sometimes, people need a third party to tell them something is fucked up for them to realise oh, that actually is fucked up and it’s impacting my life in a negative way. I liked how it also fed into Remy’s feelings not just on what Giselle was doing with him, but in how his father was fine with him being used in this way and how he didn’t care that it was the worst-kept secret in the kingdom (which begs the question of why this whole thing was never the explosive scandal it should have been and is instead treated as hot gossip, but that’s just getting into my worldbuilding problems I’ve already talked about), and how he felt the difference between the unhealthy and healthy relationships when Xiaodan and Zidan entered the picture.

Now, gather closer around my soapbox so I can talk about the execution of good drama. Remy is a bucket of issues due to his home, romantic, and professional lives which have left him with low self-esteem where he feels like everything is his fault and that he needs to earn the right to exist. For him, life consists of neverending guilt and favours exchanged, and this is a setup that I’m very interested in exploring because of the way such an outlook can impact the decisions characters make in response to that pain. What I’m not particularly interested in is other characters playing armchair psychologist with the low self-esteem character several times, where they tell them, over and over, that it’s okay, you are worthy, you are loved. For those of you not steeped in fan fic culture, this is a specific subgenre called whump, and it’s very popular within the angst circles. It’s also something I have never liked reading because these stories are written as emotion porn and, in my most humble February 2024 opinion, are the most boring version of it.

Personally, it’s more interesting to have this psychology thrumming along as subtext that informs actions; Martha Wells is really good at doing this. Having one scene like this where another character offers insight to the low self-esteem one is great, but Silver Under Nightfall has several, which is where the problems start to creep in. It puts the story into a position where whump scenes are used as the primary emotional release from an easy to access source, and therefore stunting the characters from being ... well, characters. Characters are not people, and there’s this weird paradox where we often want characters to behave like real people whilst not behaving like them at the same time. By this, I mean there is a difference in these thoughts and emotions happening to real people; junk needs to be cleared from the brain via constant reassurance in order for a message to sink in. But in fiction, this is called being repetitive and treading water, which for the lifeblood of a story is bad because you need to grind things to a halt to have these scenes happen past the first one.

In short: whump provides a short-term hit for catharsis which is good in a single dose, but overall catharsis should not be met by several small doses like this; instead, it should be met by a larger one delivered by the completion of a more challenging arc. Xiaodan and Zidan are already on Remy’s side; them offering comfort to Remy does not bring him long-term inner peace. That needs to be obtained from confronting the source of the problem, which is Remy’s father.

Also, if I have to read one more conversation that involves some variation of, “YOU USED TO BE *insert name here*’S WHORE, YOU WHORE, THERFORE YOUR POINT IS INVALID” in any book, I might just walk into the ocean; it’s such unimaginative, boring high school drama. 👏 Be 👏 more 👏 CRE 👏 A 👏 TIVE 👏 ! 👏

Okay I’m done. Weeee~!

Character: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

World: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

OVERALL: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

So this is just Dishonored but *checks quickly* uhhhhh not good?

Admittedly I picked this book up knowing it was going to be a hot pile of garbage (just the vibes, you know?), but my goodness. My goodness.

Firstly, the overarching conflict was so juvenile it was frustrating. Richard Swan, who's the author of The Justice of Kings, talked about how one of his frustrations with fantasy that led to worldbuilding and character choices in his book was that he noticed “sides” were presented as monoliths, i.e., everyone in the good kingdom is good, and everyone in the bad kingdom is bad. Granted, Richard's example was Tolkien, but damn, if that wasn't true for this book too. Everyone in the good kingdom is good and righteous, and everyone in the invading empire, down to the gruntiest of grunts, is a zealot for their God Emperor, and it doesn't ring true as to how humans work. Shades of grey are well and good in stories, and many don't need them, but it would have been nice to see some variety to characters on both sides, whether it be Guard #1026 screaming battle cries as he runs towards certain death, to the people caught in the middle who maybe put loyalty to their lives and themselves above loyalty to any one righteous cause.

Secondly, the religious aspect of this book was not handled well. I think the most frustrating thing about this was I thought Dalglish intended to write a sincere depiction of how religion plays into people's daily lives, and the pain they experience when it's been banned by an overpowering nation, but it comes off as someone who's very areligious and has been coasting along on those dang vibes again to write the book. The only theology that seems to be in place is “our dude/s are better than your dude/s and we'll prove it by killing you in a gruesome fashion”. I felt like the competing religions were treated more like sports teams which wasn't ... great.

Thirdly, there was a whole lot of logic lacking in this. Like, sure, the deposed heir assassinating his way back into power is like, a sick and timeless fantasy trope, but there are so many ways these characters could have strengthened that premise, you know? Just by asking some few, obvious questions or having some sense of empathy for people other than the main cast. The plan to make Cyrus the one and only Vagrant was ... questionable? If he's to hide behind a mask, make lots of them! Don't put all your eggs in one basket! Maybe that way you can help the people of Thanet in the meantime whilst you're training Cyrus up because he's the one who knows the secrets of the ones in power or something. I was disappointed. What happens if he refused to be trained? What happens if he dies on a mission through random bad luck? What if he quits because he can't stomach it anymore? Does your whole rebellion then fall apart? Again, it just felt like a lot of very simple questions were not thought about.

(Also made me laugh that this evil empire is intent on conquering a small island nation that has the same distance between itself and the empire's mainland that Europe and North America have, if it takes two to three months to reach it via sail.)

Finally, my other sticking point is that the narrative felt unfocused. The first and last parts felt solid, but the core of the book really did feel like a bunch of scenes mushed together until they were book length. I didn't feel much of a cause and effect going on; it was just characters running from gory scenario to gory scenario, only for them to wait and be directed towards the next bad guys they had to take down. It felt like a bunch of side quests? Lending to the unfocused feeling too were the number of POVs. I wouold have appreciated if these had been cut down to a handful.

Overall, even though I wasn't expecting much going in as, in my experience, assassin premises are executed more poorly than not (why is that anyway? It's weird that the only “good” assassin book/s I tend to hear about are the Night Angel ones (also provided you close your eyes to the sheer amount of rape going on in those)), I wish more thought was put into character and drama instead of sneaking, swordplay, and gore as I love assassin/rogue archetypes :(