Jonathan Koan's Reviews > Dragonsbane

Barbara Hambly brings a simplicity to Fantasy that many authors lack. She tells a straight forward adventure story with enough worldbuilding to make it seem like a realized world, but it never felt bogged down in worldbuilding or magicsystem. Its an adventure tale with a very different protagonist and "party".

Jenny Waynest doesn't fit the bill of a traditional hero, or even a traditional heroine. She is a 37 year old mother of 2 who is also a mage and she lives with the Dragonsbane: John Aversin. They are contacted by the young man Gareth, who asks them in helping to kill a Dragon down in the south.

Jenny being an older than usual protagonist for Fantasy (most Fantasy protagonists are teens or 20s), she brings a very different perspective to the story that lends it uniqueness. I think that Hambly excellently weighed the value of family and traditional living vs the more modern working woman role. Even though I don't agree with everything in the book, I still appreciated the way that Hambly wrote Jenny here and I really enjoyed the ending with Jenny's journey and where it appears to go. I assume many readers will not appreciate this, however.

I think this book simplifies the adventure story that we see originate in the Hobbit well. Hambly does for that "slay the dragon/go on an adventure" story the way that Elizabeth Haydon tackles the complexity of a story like the Wheel of Time in her Symphony of Ages books. Both Hambly and Haydon tell these excellent stories with unique perspectives that provide a counterpoint to the way that Women are often portrayed in culture and literature today.

This book takes a bit of a twist about halfway through, in that the true villian is not exactly all that it appears. I think that Hambly handled this well, and the crux of the story is still true to the pitch of the story.

Being a really short book of 340 pages, Hambly doesn't have any fluff to it. The story moves along fairly quickly.

I have one critique with the way that I don't think that Hambly spend enough time with the location or the characters of the Citadel, and could have had 20ish more pages of understanding why that subplot was important.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was a breeze to read and I really had fun and am optimistic about reading book 2. I'll give this one a 9 out of 10.