Monday, September 7, 2015

Voices of Dragons by Carrie Vaughn


Title: Voices of Dragons
Author: Carrie Vaughn
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: HarperTeen
My Rating: 3 Stars

    I tried reading this book years ago and never finished because I was bothered by Kay's friend's obsession with sex. However, I decided to return to the novel and this time I actually finished it.
    Dragons are awesome, and that is why I continued reading this book. It's a friendship between Kay-a teenage girl-and Artegal-a dragon. Sounds wonderful, right? But the author's writing style seemed far less sophisticated than I would have liked and there were a few times when the grammar/word usage was incorrect.
    Despite her best friend Tam's obsession with having sex with her boyfriend and trying to get Kay to do the same, Kay didn't really ever want to. At all. With the information given to us by the author, I think it may be safe to say that Kay is asexual, which is really cool because there aren't many books with ace characters.
   The ending....*sigh*. This book wasn't really resolved at all. And there is no sequel to my knowledge. Carrie Vaughn wrote another YA book-Steel-soon after Voices of Dragons and it has nothing to do with this story. She has also continued to publish her adult novels, so it doesn't seem like we will ever get a sequel or find out what happened to Kay and Artegal and the war between dragons and humanity.
    In the back of the book, there is an author's note, saying that Ms. Vaughn had this idea of "Kay riding a dragon and dodging cops." But it didn't work out the way she had planned so she changed the story and made Kay a teenager. I really wish I could read the original version...and that the writing style would have been more advanced.
I think I enjoyed Steel better.

**Update-Ms. Vaughn has said that she wants to write a sequel, but the publisher doesn't want to publish it and she has too many other book contracts to fulfill.

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

The Drosten's Curse by A.L. Kennedy

**While reading my review, please keep in mind that I have a very limited knowledge of Classic Who and the Fourth Doctor.


Title: The Drosten's Curse
Author: A.L. Kennedy
Genre: Science Fiction
My Rating: 4 Stars

I enjoyed reading this book. It was written in a different style than I am used to, though it reminded me a bit of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's writing (perhaps just because they write differently than I am used to as well, I don't know)
When I started The Drosten's Curse, I didn't think that the Doctor was written at all like the Doctor usually acts. However, I didn't notice it that much as I got father into the book, and it also could have been that I just don't know the Fourth Doctor well enough to recognize his habits and mannerisms.
I really liked Bryony and Putta. They were great characters, very funny (especially when interacting with each other), and if I was the type of person to ship characters, I would probably ship them.
The antagonist in this novel was very interesting.  Conflicts in science fiction are always much more interesting when the opposing entity isn't actually "evil", they are just influenced to be so because of how they receive information. (However, this can also make the stories 10 times scarier-like The Empty Child)
Some of this book was confusing, though, and at parts it seemed to drag on...Honestly, I thought that at page 80 it could have just ended and been a novella if some of the details had been tweaked a bit.

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I received this book from the Blogging For Books program in exchange for my honest review.