Birth of the Firebringer

I kinda wanna give this two stars, but I'll give it three because overall, this is not a bad book. I kept reading it, so it was interesting. But also felt so...hard. Jan is so flat. He's like a piece of cardboard that ocassionally gets heated and does something interesting, but is otherwise just lying there being a boring piece of carboard. I feel like more stuff happens to him in this book rather than him doing things. He's boring.

Dagg is also one of the worst side protagonists I've seen. He's useless. He's the obligatory best buddy and nothing more. He has no personality other than being loyal to Jan and ocassionally silly.

Tek is more interesting than both of them, but she's nothing special either. I kept getting her mixed up with Tek and Teki. I can't even remember when the author introduced Teki? Also, her mom started to get annoying. She has a nice name though: Jah-Lilah.

So, the plot was kind of interesting. I didn't really know what to expect when I started reading this book. The unicorns are all sorts of crazy colors like blue and rose. That bothered me a bit, but that's nitpicking. Also, by the end of the book I realized that this world of griffins and unicorns, wryms and such exist side-by-side with our world? By that, I mean, earth, with plain old horses and humans. And one horse ends up crossing over into the unicorn world and becoming a unicorn I thought that was so weird.

But this book has charm to it. It has heart to it. It was just so hard to read. Some of the plot and character decisions are just ridiculous.
Like, Jan often gets emotional irrationally. “That dead renagade unicorn! We should bury her and give her the proper rites” And then his dad's like, “No, she's not in the Circle,” but Jan says, “I SAID WE SHOULD BURY HER AND GIVE HER THE PROPER RITES.” Like, dude. I get that he's very passionate about burying the corpse properly, but then he refuses to move when Tek, Dagg, and his father urge him to hurry up and follow the herd. That was kinda stupid, in my opinion. And then, we find out that the wyrm was giving Jan dreams in order to drive him to become a Renegade. What? The dreams were supposed to turn him against his herd? The dream about an egg in the sky? The dream of being chased by a serpent underwater (or something like that)? How was that supposed to make him want to become a renegade? I don't know about y'all, but to me, that makes zero sense.

Anyway, the book was okay. It was interesting enough, while being mercifully short. I probably won't read the rest of the trilogy, but this book was creative and interesting. My enjoyment rating is two stars, but I also respect the author and acknowledge that it's just not the kind of book I prefer, so I think, for an overall rating, this book deserves at least three stars.

Also, the ending was so predictable. Everyone knows that most colts and fillies are born brown.