Dragon Haven
(The Rain Wilds Chronicles, Volume 2)
Robin Hobb
Eos (HarperCollins)
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Dragons are back in the world... but not as they once were. The first of their kind to undergo the metamorphosis from sea serpent to dragon in centuries emerged from their cocoons malformed, many not even surviving their first year. But ancestral memories tell them of a great city far up the acidic Rain Wilds River, built by the humanlike Elderlings in the days when dragon and man lived in reasonable accord: if there is to be any hope of a future for the young ones, surely it is to be found there. With a contingent of keepers (castoffs from the Rain Wilds Trader families, so heavily marked by the mutations of the region as to be second-class citizens and marked for early death anyway) to help them forage for food, they set off into regions no traders have explored and survived to tell the tale.
Well into the journey, the tensions of travel and hardship wear upon dragons and humans alike. No dragon can recall the distance or route to Kelsingra, and even if they could, the land has been drastically altered in the centuries of their absence... assuming the Elderling city still stands at all. Even the captain and crew of the Tarman, a wizardwood barge sent to accompany the dragons as far upriver as possible, are feeling the stress. But tension isn't the only force at work. Between the harsh, acidic waters of the river, the rigors of survival, the close quarters, and the forceful presence of the dragons themselves, everyone finds themselves changing in ways they never expected. Yet a danger still lurks among them, a shadow stretching clear from the distant, dying Duke of Chalced - even far from all known civilization, the call of Chalcedean gold offered for a dragon carcass might be too great a temptation to resist.
REVIEW: Okay, not the most helpful review, but it's difficult to not give away spoilers about Volume One. Having finished this second (and possibly final) book, I stand by my earlier conviction that the Rain Wilds Chronicles was never meant to be a multivolume story. The plot suffers under the unnatural extension. At least half of both books boils down to padding. Characters prove themselves impossibly dense and self-pitying, mostly to boost page count as they prod old wounds and endlessly ponder their pasts and futures, all while refusing to open their eyes to see what's right in front of them. Even those few I'd enjoyed from the previous book got on my nerves, and it was only when I passed the halfway mark that they started to redeem themselves in any way. For all that extra length, though, the ending feels oddly abrupt. Hobb still presents some nice ideas, and I still enjoy her world's dragons and Elderlings. I just wish she'd written a shorter story, preferably with more likable characters and less pointless introspection.
(I also have to say that the cover art, with its unconvincing 3D dragons that don't even match the book, could've been better.)
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