The 19 Dragons (SM Reine)

The 19 Dragons
SM Reine
SM Reine, publisher
Fiction, Fantasy
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Long ago, the world worshipped dragons. Each of these immortal beings was a pillar for part of the Earth, their personalities as varied as their domains. Then greed and forgetfulness overcame mankind, and the slayers came to pierce their hides and plunder their hoards. So the dragons took on mortal bodies, rebirthing as themselves so long as the sacred Device was in their possession. Thus they could hide from the slayers and still watch over their world.
But not all dragons were content with this fate. Nor were they content to let a world that had forgotten them - had actively turned on them - continue to live in peace.
Now, as war shakes the world, great automatons and dirigibles from the East raining fiery devastation upon the city of New Haven, the Device is stolen. One by one, the dragons fall - and, with them, the corners of the earth whose pillars they formed. Even as the survivors race to unearth the traitor in their midst, pieces of the world vanish into the eternal Void. Should the last dragon fall, the world itself shall end, and not even dragons may be reborn from the nothing that remains.
A Kindle-exclusive title.

REVIEW: This intrigued me with its mixture of dragon lore and steampunk. Reine's world is bleak, torn by a senseless war and directed by those who merely use Man's short-sighted and destructive instincts to further their own selfish ends. With 20 chapters, nearly one of the titular 19 dragons falls in each, a long and increasingly dim death march for a world too caught up in its own struggles to care. Despite the darkness, I found it interestingly different... until close to the end. Reine then abandons her otherwise-original ideas and pulls a handful of plot twists out of the Void, never quite explaining how the apocalyptic climax resolved anything before segueing to a too-hopeful and happy (and pointless) conclusion. She also gets too clever for her own good with the formatting, especially during the finale. Disappointing.

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