Dragon Keeper
(The Rain Wilds Chronicles, Book 1)
Robin Hobb
Eos (HarperCollins)
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: The war between the Traders of Bingtown and the Chalcedean raiders is over, won in no small part through the Traders' pact with the dragon Tintaglia. In exchange for keeping the Chalcedean ships away from their shores and the Rain Wilds River - home of the buried Elderling cities and the secretive Rain Wilds Trader families who extract their treasures - the humans agreed to help Tintaglia usher in the next generation of dragons. The sea serpents (in truth larval dragons) finally fulfilled their ancestral urges, swimming up the acidic Rain Wilds River to build their cases on the banks and complete the metamorphosis into full-fledged dragons.
At last, the much-anticipated day of their emergence has come... but something has gone horribly wrong. What crawls from the cases are not, as Tintaglia was, adult dragons ready to fly and hunt. These hatchlings are deformed, deficient in body, ancestral memory, and - in some cases - mind. None are flightworthy, and many don't even survive long past emerging. Tintaglia herself seems to have given up hope, abandoning the hatchlings and the Rain Wilds River when she finds a new mate. Bound by their contract, the Traders continue feeding the dragonlings, but the costs are mounting and rewards minimal... and there are rumors of a very handsome prize from the ailing Chalcedean lord, seeking dragon flesh for its miraculous curative properties...
Incomplete ancestral memories tell the dragonlings of a great Elderling city which once lay further up the Rain Wilds River, in the days before the massive cataclysm that destroyed the Elderlings and turned the waters acidic. If there is to be any hope of them surviving, surely it is to be found among the remains of the civilization where dragons and humanlike Elderlings once lived in peaceable coexistence. But, malformed and unable to hunt, they cannot make the journey alone. They will need humans to travel with them, on what will likely be a one-way journey into a land so wild and dangerous not even the hardiest of Rain Wilds Traders have ever braved its depths and lived to tell the tale.
REVIEW: I loved Robin Hobb's Liveship Traders trilogy, and am thrilled to see her continue to explore this part of her greater Farseer universe. (I wasn't as impressed with her Farseer Saga, and haven't read the follow-up Tawny Man trilogy; some reference is made here to events in those books, summing up enough so casual readers shouldn't be thrown.) Her dragons are wonderfully unique, even if they are often remarkably arrogant around puny little humans, and I enjoy her world of the mysterious Rain Wilds and the liveships. Unfortunately, this feels more like a piece of a book than a whole book in and of itself. It ends on a strangely incomplete note, as if it were randomly cropped from a much larger work. (This may well be what happened; the second book, Dragon Haven, is already out, a suspiciously fast turnaround time unless the two were written as one.) Roughly half of the book is merely a setup to the journey, establishing characters and rivalries and motivations, which seemed a little much given the size of the book itself; the journey was barely underway when I ran into the back cover. As I've come to expect, Hobb creates nicely-drawn characters, each one with strengths and flaws, and while I found one in particular irritatingly selfish, I'm reserving full judgment until the end of the series; one of the most irritating people in her Liveship books become one of the most powerful and intriguing by the end, after all, so something similar may be in the works here. On the whole, I liked what I read, but thus far I prefer the Liveship books.
(When I finished, I strongly considered ordering the second volume, but I have to keep my reading slate relatively clean for the impending arrival of the sixth Temeraire book. Sorry, Hobb, but right now Novik's producing more consistent work...)
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