Dragon Rider by Taran Matharu

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.

In the last couple of years I've read a few books by YA authors delving into writing adult fantasy. Every one of them flopped in my opinion. Needless to say, I was skeptical about picking this one up. But, it has dragons! So of course I had to give it a go. I was pleasantly surprised.

Jai is the son of Rohan, the leader of one of the Steppefolk tribes. When Rohan lost the war against the Sabines, he was executed and his sons made prisoners of the Sabine Emperor. Jai has been the ward of the aging Emperor for years now. The Sabine empire has since passed to the son of the man that killed his father.

Emperor Constantine has made a match between his son and the Dansk princess. Uniting their people will expand the empire and give the Sabines what they've never had. Dragons.

I had a great time reading this. I love dragon books, political fantasy, and interesting magic. This has all of those things. I also loved Jai, Frida, Winter, and Rufus. There are plenty of characters to loathe as well.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an e-arc.