The Butcher's Masquerade (Matt Dinniman)

The Butcher's Masquerade
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Book 5
Matt Dinniman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Since the start of the dungeons, Carl and the other crawlers have not only been prey for various "mobs" and NPCs, but subject to the whims of the game sponsors and other outside influences. But before, those outsiders could not directly interfere or enter the dungeons (save as embodied in other forms).
On the sixth floor, everything changes.
The Hunting Grounds see the crawlers subject not just to increasingly-deadly monsters and quests, but to hunters from the greater galaxy, come to collect bounties or simply trophies and bragging rights, as well as valuable loot for the upcoming ninth floor faction wars. It all culminates in the Butcher's Masquerade, a grand party - complete with pet show and talent competition - to close out the level... and, not incidentally, pick off the top crawlers to shake things up for future floors. Carl and Donut already have made enemies among the political elite, even as they've gained countless followers and fans. This puts a target on their heads, and the hunters are eager to take a shot.
But Carl, Donut, and their other allies are not the same people they were when they wandered down that first stairwell from the devastated surface of Earth. If the hunters think the crawlers are going to die easily, then they haven't been paying attention.
This book contains the fifth installment of "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret," an ongoing bonus story set elsewhere in the dungeons.

REVIEW: Many series either plateau or drop off by the fifth book. Once again, Dinniman astounds.
Carl, Donut, and the others are not at all the same people they were at the start of the series, not always in good ways. Carl remains determined to resist all efforts to break him, but he and his morals have been distinctly bent by the needs of survival, even as his rage at the dungeon masters grows ever greater. He's taking bigger risks, and they sometimes blow up in his face, or the faces of the people he talked into trusting him. In the previous floor, he and Donut stopped being mere victims of the dungeon and started fighting back (though, of course, they're still stuck playing the "game" even as they plot acts of sabotage and rebellion). Here, with the faces of actual enemies before him in a setting where he has power - unlike the moments before when they've been transported to talk shows and other settings for grotesque interviews or game shows - he finally has a chance to unleash some of the rage that's been building within him from the start... but the game masters, of course, have ways of retaliating.
Donut, too, is not the cat she once was, and anyone who dismisses her soon learns that, long before they were bred for cat shows and companionship, cats were natural hunters. But her mind is no longer that of a pure animal, and she's feeling the stress, shock, and trauma every bit as much as Carl, even as she struggles to articulate it. Her increasingly human intelligence is also shown in how she remembers her life before the dungeons, which comes to the forefront when they encounter a face from their past. The dungeon throws an extra low blow at her when it brings in her old beau Gravy Boat, a.k.a. "Ferdinand," the neighbor's orange tom, now enhanced, brainwashed and turned into an NPC familiar of the floor's ultimate boss.
Carl and Donut know full well the twisted truth behind NPCs, how even those with familiar faces are no longer, and never will be again, the people they once were, but that doesn't make it easier to see one's family members, lovers, or even fallen crawlers "return"... which is, of course, quite intentional. The games have always had many layers - entertainment, blood sport, political commentary, and more - but first and foremost they are designed to inflict as much physical and psychological damage on the involuntary "crawlers" before their deaths as possible. It's thrown into surreal perspective when Carl is forcibly recruited to appear (holographically) at CrawlCon, a convention for fans of the dungeon crawler season. While Donut revels in her fan base, Carl cannot help feeling repulsed by the packed rooms full of people who are, in their own ways, cheering for the torture and death of everyone on his planet, despite all the cosplay and fan art professing their affection... and, of course, it's one more trap set up by the creators, another way to both psychologically mess with him and create more enemies and complications that will haunt him and his allies further into the dungeon, especially concerning the mantids.
The floor itself, the Hunting Grounds, changes up the formula again. The addition of the hunters adds a fresh wrinkle on top of the new monsters and quests and the backstories. Carl also has to reckon with the bargain he made with the elite Signet and the production company behind her show (that she is blissfully unaware of, being an NPC)... but the show is not the safety net he'd hoped, and may be a greater danger than an asset. There's also the goddess-possessed decapitated sex doll head from the previous floor, Samantha, who is becoming more of a character, if one driven by her own agenda and with unreliable motives. And the other crawlers have their own stories and fates, particularly the enhanced goat Prepotente and his former shepherd Miriam Dom. Donut and the goat have a particular bond, being the only enhanced animal crawlers, but Prepotente gets a particularly unpleasant shock that changes him in ways nobody anticipated, and which Donut can't help him with. Needless to say, the crawler cast thins significantly even before the Butcher's Masquerade finale, which provides a truly gory and spectacular ending to a brutal level, complete with a dinosaur dance line.
Meanwhile, the fifth chapter of the bonus story introduces another new character and angle on the ongoing arc of the NPCs building their revenge dungeon on the eighteenth floor, not all of whom believe in the promise of paradise beyond the games. But even here, the AI and game masters revel in cruelty and torment, yanking hope away even when that hope was barely a glimmer in the darkness.
I kicked this back up to a full five stars because of the plot twists and developments that ramped up the stakes even higher than before, and some truly heartbreaking moments and lines amid some bright spots and hilarity. There is still a bit of name sprawl and political tangle to navigate, but nothing I couldn't read around or past and pick up the gist. I might take a short break to read a novella before the sixth installment, which is a whopper of a book (north of 800 pages), but I'm looking forward to where things go from here.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (Matt Dinniman) - My Review
Die Volume 1 (Kieron Gillen) - My Review
Dark Lord of Derkholm (Diana Wynne Jones) - My Review

The Gate of the Feral Gods (Matt Dinniman)

The Gate of the Feral Gods
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Book 4
Matt Dinniman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Reluctant dungeon crawler Carl, his ex-girlfriend's cat Princess Donut, Donut's pet dinosaur Mongo, and their partner Katia have survived to reach the fifth level, and once again find a fresh challenge and even more devious traps awaiting them. The surviving human crawlers have been scattered into a series of bubble-like microhabitats, each with four castles that need to be conquered. Sounds pretty straightforward, but nothing in the dungeons is ever straightforward. As before, there are deeper layers of lore, ever-escalating boss monster threats, and situations specifically engineered by the game runners to maximize suffering and boost body counts... and that's not taking into account the increasingly destabilizing effects of intragalactic political clashes and an AI that's increasingly unpredictable. But, even as they face dirigible-piloting gnomes and shapeshifting changelings and undead gods, one thing remains the same: Carl is determined to defy the game masters and strike back any way he can, even at the cost of his own life.
This book contains the fourth installment of "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret," an ongoing bonus story set elsewhere in the dungeons.

REVIEW: For a series that could easily fall into repetition and "level grinding," Dinniman manages to keep things fresh and interesting, ratcheting up the stakes and the challenges and growing the characters in unexpected ways. Carl and company make some new allies (and enemies), but they're also learning enough to start resisting more effectively, finding ways to circumvent the increasingly intrusive observers (both show-runners and viewers). The party's reputation is a mixed bag when it comes to convincing other crawlers to aid them, and the bounties don't exactly help engender trust, but they still try their best to avoid antagonizing more people; they have enough active enemies, some of which have become terrifyingly overpowered (and terrifyingly free of any lingering morality about helping the aliens exterminate the species). The expanding list of named crawlers again sometimes threatens to overwhelm at times, but Dinniman has a way of jogging the reader's memory about who they are and where they fit in.
Within the game, the horrors of what's happening to the humans and the NPCs grows even more grotesque and unbearable, and Carl and Donut find their most useful outside contacts threatened directly - the political game of the greater galaxy is potentially every bit as twisted, sadistic, and cruel as anything within the dungeons. Worse, the AI's fetishization of Carl moves from a peculiar quirk to a potentially game-destabilizing obsession, further signs that the Syndicate's corner-cutting rush job going into this "season" is causing greater chaos and danger to everyone involved - but at this point too many people are too deeply invested to pull the plug, assuming the plug can even be pulled. And it's pulling great ratings, so why would they?
As before, there are some humorous moment, some crude (if funny) bits, and all manner of violent battles and unique monsters and intricate puzzles that have me in awe of Dinniman's ability to craft involving but ultimately understandable game elements (not to mention how he can plant tiny details that end up coming into play later down the line; the man must have a series bible the size of a small planet by now), but there's also a very human heart and tragedy underneath it all that keeps the whole concept from flying completely off the rails and beyond caring about. All of this ratchets up to a finale where Carl and Donut prove that they're ready to step up and stop simply letting the dungeon's horrors happen to them.... just when the epilogue promises a fresh monkey wrench about to be thrown into the works.
The fourth installment of the ongoing bonus story brings in yet another group of NPCs, further exploring the lives of the NPCs recruited to craft a death-trap level deep in the dungeons for any survivors who defy the odds to get that far down. Not all of them are buying the party line about a promised paradise beyond the end of the game, and more trouble is brewing even as the game up above is spiraling further out of the creators' control.
All in all, this series just keeps me riveted - enough that I found myself pre-ordering the eighth installment even before I'd finished reading the fourth. Since that book just arrived today, I may do something I rarely do: buckle down for a solid, back-to-back series binge read. If I manage to sneak a shorter title or two in between, I may, but I'm really getting invested at this point, and it's so very nice to have something that truly makes me excited anymore.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Matt Dinniman) - My Review
The True Meaning of Smekday (Adam Rex) - My Review
Space Opera (Catherynne M. Valente) - My Review

April Site Update

The month's books have been archived and cross-linked on the main Brightdreamer Books site.

Enjoy!

Skeleton Song (Seanan McGuire)

Skeleton Song
The Wayward Children series, Story 7.7
Seanan McGuire
Tor
Fiction, YA? Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: In the world of Mariposa, days belong to the butterflies and bees and bright flowers, while the nights are the realm of the skeleton people, revived and maintained by the song of the world until dawn, when they rest again in their catacomb beds underground. The human boy Christopher came to Mariposa through a door from the hospital where he lay dying of bone cancer, but the Princess used her magic to save him. They fell in love. But she's a skeleton girl and he's a boy of living, hideous flesh, from another world no less... can they ever be together, or will the doors tear them apart again?
This short story is part of the Wayward Children series.

REVIEW: Like all children and teens at Eleanor West's boarding school for former world-travelers, Christopher's backstory has been teased and hinted at, as he speaks of his beloved Skeleton Girl and plays silent tunes on his bone flute that make bones dance. This short story delves into his time in Mariposa, and like all stories of the lost worlds beyond the doors, it's a tale of wonder and sorrow and deep, inevitable loss. Mariposa is a world of golden light and brilliant butterflies and endless song, where death is a celebration and life a bad memory quickly forgotten. Despite the prejudices of the skeletons and his status as an outsider, Christopher truly does love the world and the Princess, and she loves him. They wish to marry, but first they must speak to the King and Queen deep in the catacombs, where they will learn if their union is even possible; even if he were to die naturally, none of the skeleton people remember their living selves, so Christopher's reborn skeleton may be an entirely different person. Always, though, there's the threat of another door that might whisk him back to Earth.
It's interesting and beautiful and sad by turns, though it's ultimately just a little vignette, a glimpse at another world lost and soul torn by the seemingly fickle doors, and doesn't tell the reader anything they hadn't already been told (or could infer).

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Divide (Elizabeth Kay) - My Review
Under the Whispering Door (TJ Klune) - My Review
Every Heart a Doorway (Seanan McGuire) - My Review

The Six Deaths of the Saint (Alix E. Harrow)

The Six Deaths of the Saint
The Into Shadow collection, Story 3
Alix E. Harrow
Amazon Original Stories
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: The servant girl was dying, sent out to the barn lest her sickly cries upset the rest of the household, when the Saint of War first came to her. Heeding Her call, the girl rises from her deathbed and finds herself whisked away by a Prince, who - heeding prophecy - trains her as his champion. The Saint whispers to her whenever her life is in peril, and by her blade the Prince becomes a King, her own name sung in praise and fear across the land as his loyal Devil upon the battlefield... until she learns the secret behind his power, and her own.

REVIEW: Part of a short story anthology by Amazon, this is a solid read, but the weakest tale by Harrow I've read thus far - which still makes it pretty good.
Never naming the girl or saint (or most of the characters), it places the reader both inside and outside the tale, switching between second and first person points of view in a way that gives the whole thing a nightmare edge. From the start, there's something ominous about the arrival of the Saint of War, a shadow over the blessing, but she is too convinced of the vision's purity, and too convinced of her own devotion to the Prince and his priestly companion, to doubt. Any sacrifice she makes, any life struck down, any blood shed is worthwhile if it serves the Prince, whom she thinks she loves... all but ignoring the faithful bowlegged kitchen boy who has followed her from the start, first as friend and then as squire. It's not until she starts noticing him that she truly begins to question her path - something that doesn't happen even when she discovers the true secret behind her blessing (which might more accurately be deemed a curse - I won't go into details for spoiler reasons). Other Harrow titles managed to have the women mature and grow mostly for their own sakes, not due to love (or lack of love) of a man. The ending is dark, inevitable, and cathartic.
It's not a bad story by any means, and it's short enough not to overwork its premise or overstay its welcome. I'm just used to Harrow delivering just a slight bit more.

You Might Also Enjoy:
King's Dragon (Kate Elliott) - My Review
The Once and Future Witches (Alix E. Harrow) - My Review
She Who Became the Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan) - My Review

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook (Matt Dinniman)

The Dungeon Anarchist's Cookbook
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Book 3
Matt Dinniman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Carl, Princess Donut, Mongo, and their new companion Katia barely survived the third floor of the apocalyptic dungeon whose outcome will determine the fate of humanity... and, in doing so, they made even more enemies than they already had. But their antics are earning them great ratings across the galaxy, and with it opportunities for lucrative sponsors - and the team is going to need every possible advantage they can get, because the fourth floor is a tangled mess... literally. The "Iron Tangle" is a vast network of railways, from old steam engines to modern monorails, running in endless loops. Among the labyrinth of landings is a puzzle to unravel before this floor, too, collapses and kills everyone who hasn't found a stairway down. Carl remains determined to save as many fellow crawlers as he can, but many people still don't trust him, others want to break up the dream team, and being on the top ten list has put a price on all their heads.
This book contains the third installment of "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret," an ongoing bonus story set elsewhere in the dungeons.

REVIEW: The third installment maintains the momentum of the previous books, maintaining the action, the humor, and the tension. Carl and Donut are an inseparable team, but they still have secrets from each other, and Katia is still an unknown quantity in many ways; knowing that she came to them under misleading pretenses, can she be trusted to side with them when the chips are down? Their mentor/manager Mordecai, meanwhile, still has secrets from his long and storied history, making him a vital resource... but he, too, has his own agenda, and when a mishap knocks him out of the game for a good stretch of the dungeon, Carl and company must learn to stop relying on him so much. Meanwhile, the politics behind the dungeon "game" itself grow more perilous, as Donut and Carl have managed to make some very powerful enemies. And within the game, of course, there's a whole new slate of "mobs" to battle - and battle they must, if they mean to survive.
Amid all the action and achievements, Carl and his companions never lose sight of the true grim desperation of their circumstances. This is not fun and games for them, or a chance to be the video game hero of their childhood dreams, but a nightmare they cannot wake from, awash in a rising sea of blood, and the only way to keep one's head above water is to cling all the harder to that core of humanity - the thing the dungeon masters are truly trying to destroy in each and every crawler. At its core, the story is a tragedy, extinction and unimaginable depravity as entertainment, and not a single person or monster the team encounters isn't scarred by that. Every time Carl thinks he's found a way to outwit the system, though, the AI and the showrunners tighten the chains, but he discovers that resistance is indeed possible, and he is not as alone as he sometimes feels.
There are times when the Iron Tangle gets a little, well, tangled, a wash of trains and stations and numbers that feel impossible to keep straight, but it's not necessary to map it all out in one's head to follow the story. The number of side characters is also growing, along with their attendant entanglements. But things sort themselves out if one sits back and lets the tale unfold. Once more, it ratchets up to a tense, and not entirely bloodless or clean, finale, setting up the next adventure/dungeon nicely. Everyone's growing across the board, creating a dynamic team.
As for the bonus story, it adds another character from the book and yet another wrinkle. The whole is foreshadowing developments later down the line, but manages not to be too precious or coy about it. The "game" has always been much bigger than the poor crawlers forced to endure (or, almost inevitably, not endure) its torments, and the bonus story highlights the greater scope and the other lives the game masters are destroying.
It goes without saying that I'll be reading on eagerly, though I'm trying to pace myself; my budget's taken a real beating this month, and I don't want to outread what I've stockpiled of the series before I can buy more.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) - My Review
Dungeon Crawler Carl (Matt Dinniman) - My Review
Caverns of Socrates (Dennis L. McKiernan) - My Review

Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir)

Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir
Ballantine Books
Fiction, SciFi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Dr. Ryland Grace wakes on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, let alone why he's there at all. Two corpses are all that remains of the rest of the crew. When he discovers that the nearest star isn't the sun he's known all his life, things get even stranger... but as fragmentary memories surface, he realizes just how dire his situation is.
It all started when the sun began dimming inexplicably. When the culprit was discovered to be a form of microscopic life entirely unlike anything seen on Earth, a top team of experts recruited Ryland - once a prominent scientist who wrote a controversial thesis on hypothetical extraterrestrial life possibilities, now a middle school teacher who shuns academia - to study the "Astrophage" and, hopefully, find a cure before reduced sunlight triggers a mass extinction event. But he was never supposed to be out here alone, especially not with fragmented memories.
Then he sees the flare of another engine, and he learns that he's not as alone as he thought he was... nor is Earth the only world in danger.

REVIEW: The movie based on this book, starring Ryan Gosling, has been dominating the box office and gets little but positive buzz everywhere I look, but I hear many people who read the book first grumble at what was trimmed. I have not seen the movie yet, but I just finished the book... and I have to say that there's quite a bit that could be cut that might've improved the reading experience, page-eating tangents that made the first half drag so bad I nearly gave up.
From the start, there's a certain "Gary Stu" vibe to Dr. Ryland Grace that, along with Weir's love of long scientific tangents into minutiae that seems to exist largely to show off how much thought he put into the intricacies of his ideas, overshadows the overall story and what should have been a gripping premise. The man can "science" anything better than anyone else, yet nobly prefers teaching children to pursuing academic accolades. When the world needs saving, though, he's plucked from obscurity as one of the earliest members of what will become Project Hail Mary, the desperate plan to save humanity (and a fair chunk of Earth's essential biome) from the effects of a dimming sun. Even here, among the best of the best, he shines as a top star despite insisting he's just an "everyman" scientist... and that was before he found himself literally as Earth's last, best hope.
Between working out his current situation on the spaceship and flashbacks to the origins of his predicament, a metric spitload of theories and experiments and science and tangents await... and when Ryland encounters the intelligent alien "Rocky" (not really a spoiler, given the movie trailers everywhere, and it's not the main twist anyway), he wastes yet more time and page count ensuring that the reader understands just how much consideration Weir put into designing a truly alien alien, not a green-skinned humanoid with a few bumps on their head. Thankfully, Ryland considers Rocky to be essentially another guy (the alien species doesn't actually have male or female sexes), dodging an old pulp cliché, though there's a bit of a "guy's club" undertone to the book that I couldn't quite guarantee was there yet couldn't quite not see, if that makes any sense.
As all this crawls across the page, past the halfway point, I found myself just picking at the book, not devouring it like I recall devouring Weir's The Martian - which also featured a fair bit of science but stayed focused on astronaut Mark Watney's survival predicament more than Project Hail Mary stays focused on that irrelevant little subplot of saving the planet. It's like there was half a story that was padded out with tangents.
Later on, the story (almost despite itself) builds up a decent momentum. Ryland actually makes a few humanizing mistakes. The scientific tangents focus a little more on the problem at hand, for all that I found myself skimming a few paragraphs now and again to get back to the plot itself. It comes down to a fairly solid wrap-up that leaves the door cracked for future developments.
The overall ideas should've earned Project Hail Mary four stars at least. Weir presents some interesting concepts and hypotheticals, and clearly put a decent amount of thought into things beyond "it looks cool" (not that there's anything wrong with that sort of story). One also has to admire a book that celebrates the possibilities of science, especially in an era where too many people (particularly those in power, despite how much of that power only exists because of science and the advancements in civilization that it creates) are actively rallying against it. But the book just could not overcome the slog of the first half when it came time for me to rate it.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Calculating Stars (Mary Robinette Kowal) - My Review
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Dennis E. Taylor) - My Review
The Martian (Andy Weir) - My Review

March Site Update

March apparently ends today, for anyone keeping track. Accordingly, the main Brightdreamer Books site has been updated with the month's reviews.

Enjoy!

Pulling the Wings Off Angels (K. J. Parker)

Pulling the Wings Off Angels
K. J. Parker
Tordotcom
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor
**+ (Bad/Okay)

DESCRIPTION: When a struggling, sinning clerical student gets in deep with local thug Florio, the bully demands an unusual form of repayment: hand over the angel his grandfather is rumored to have trapped and hidden in a place even the Almighty Unconquerable Sun cannot see. It's all just a rumor, certainly. Despite his vocation, the cleric doesn't really believe in physically manifesting epiphanies or angels... until Florio breaks open the hidden vault and they're both standing face-to-face with the impossible. This could be their ticket to the life and afterlife of their wildest dreams... or it could be the sin that reserves their spot in the eternal fires of damnation.

REVIEW: This very short novella was likened to The Good Place in the blurb on back, which was one of my favorite shows of all time; the humor was sharp, the characters flawed but trying, and the ultimate message - that change was possible, that justice could be achieved, that broken systems can be repaired - was hopeful and uplifting. So, despite being an atheist-leaning agnostic myself, and admittedly influenced by the free-to-me price, I decided to give Parker's little jaunt a try.
As one might surmise from the rating, I did not enjoy it.
This novella promises petty cruelty and bullying right in the title, and the book delivers throughout. There's just a mean-spirited nature to the whole story that put me off almost from the start and never went away. Everyone in it is slimy, conniving, selfish, cruel, and utterly unaccountable to anyone but themselves. God is a bully running a rigged system, the angel's a jerk, and the story natters around in theological paradoxes where all the answers end in damnation and hopelessness. Is a world without a supreme deity pulling the strings better than one lorded over by a rat bastard who openly admits there's no way to win His inherently contradictory game? Not really, no, and any justice or vindication is hollow and short-lived. Instead of The Good Place's optimism, I got a bunch of snarky and unpleasant people being snarky and unpleasant and ultimately damned no matter what they do or don't do, so why bother.
Maybe if I were more of a theology student myself and were more personally invested in the religious debates and their histories (which Parker was obviously parodying in this alternate world), I'd have found it more amusing. But I'm not, and I didn't. This one can't go in the giveaway bag fast enough...

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Wish List (Eoin Colfer) - My Review
How to Be Perfect (Michael Schur) - My Review
Envy of Angels (Matt Wallace) - My Review

Damsel (Evelyn Skye)

Damsel
Evelyn Skye
Random House
Fiction, YA Fantasy/Media Tie-In
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: The rest of the world may consider the drought-stricken duchy of Inophe to be backwards and worthless, but to Elodie and her father it is beautiful in its own stark, strong way. Despite being noble born, the young woman is not above building shacks or digging latrine ditches if that's what her people need of her; that's what being a leader is, after all, working hard to ensure the success of the people you lead. When her father announces that he's arranged a marriage with Prince Henry of the prosperous island nation of Aurea, she doesn't hesitate but accepts it as her role, her way of ensuring Inophe's survival. Besides, after several months of exchanging letters, it's clear that he's an educated, intelligent young man who respects her, so perhaps the marriage that saves her nation might also spark genuine love. When she and her family arrive at Aurea, they find green forests and purple mountains, great fields of amber barley and scarlet berries, orchards of silver pears, and a gilded castle, plus Prince Henry is every bit as cultured and handsome as Elodie could have imagined. It's so much like a fairy tale it's hard to believe it's all happening to someone like her!
Then, on her wedding night, Henry's mother escorts Elodie to a secret ritual... a ritual that ends in a mountain chasm where a great dragon dwells. The beast's power enables the great bounty of the island, but in exchange it demands sacrifices - and she's just become one.
But Elodie is not the first to be thrown to the cunning, cruel beast beneath the mountain. Those who came before left more than charred bones and melted tiaras; they left markers, maps, and blood that whispers of their thoughts and fears and what they learned in their final days. With their help, perhaps Elodie of Inophe will manage to be the first to escape the dragon's wrath...
Based on the screenplay by Dan Mazeali for the Netflix movie Damsel.

REVIEW: I remember seeing the teasers for the Netflix movie and being intrigued, though mixed reviews and a general lack of time kept me from watching it. But I found this book, an adaptation of the original screenplay, for free at my old work place, and figured it would be worth a try. Having finished it, I don't think I'll be moving the movie into the viewing queue any time soon.
In its favor, Damsel reads fairly fast; I polished off nearly half of it during a long wait at the tire shop while my car was serviced, and finished the rest by the next evening. It establishes reasonably strong women, and after a meandering setup (even if I hadn't known the sacrifice "twist" from the movie trailers, the blurb on the cover gives that away, so drawing out the reveal grows mildly tedious as Elodie notes yet dismisses a string of yellow, orange, and finally glaring red flags over Prince Henry and Aurea) it delivers on the horror-like premise of a lone young woman trapped in a cavernous labyrinth with a taunting, teasing monster. Everywhere she goes, she finds marks and bones to remind her how many have tried and failed to survive the wyrm's wrath, how many have been betrayed by the Aurean royal house over the centuries. The terror is heightened when Elodie discovers that touching the bloodstains of previous victims lets her experience memories of their final days... but those stains, along with notes scratched into the walls, also provide a record of everything the previous victims over the past eight centuries have learned in their efforts to elude the dragon. Building on their progress, from mapping the maze of caverns to translating the wyrm's archaic language, Elodie might stand a slender chance of escape... but will getting away from the beast only make things worse? You don't just break a centuries-old system (or aggravate a centuries-old dragon) without significant collateral damage that may just kill you and everyone you love anyway.
There is no easy answer to the problem, not for her or the people of Aurea, many of whom are deeply troubled by the secret of their nation's wealth but haven't had the courage to fight back until now. If the parallel to Ursula K. Le Guin's classic story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" isn't obvious, the book hammers home that point more than once (if not using the words), even as it emphasizes how good intentions and gray areas get smudged into black by small steps and willful blindness compounded over years and generations, no single drop of water willing to take responsibility for, let alone attempt to stop, the rising flood. Even the dragon is trapped in its own way by the bargain made generations ago, though that does not make it an ally of Elodie's efforts to survive the royal family's betrayal; it just makes the beast that much more enraged and dangerous, not to mention that much more experienced in the hunting and killing of problematic princesses.
As for the beast, the dragon draws on elder traditions in the vein of Smaug, a clever yet cruel beast whose rage cannot be reasoned away and whose scales and sheer power have bested fully armed knights, let alone princesses with little but stones and the fraying remnants of their wedding finery. At every turn, it taunts its prey, and Elodie (and, by proxy, the reader) can never be certain when she has truly outsmarted it or when it's merely toying with her by letting her think she's outsmarted it, only to surprise her with flames and sulfurous smoke and terrible threats. This is not a case of every other knight and princess being a total dunderhead or wimp until she comes along; it is very little wonder that nobody else has outwitted or outlasted the dragon's games, making it a truly formidable opponent even to a plucky young woman like Elodie.
Where the book lost ground in the ratings is towards the end, where it started feeling like it was stretching out the tension, only to pull a resolution out of its tail that felt unsatisfactory given all that had gone before. The story also, after going out of its way to establish how it was women who ultimately found empowerment to challenge injustice, then fell back on a tired trope that knocked the legs out from under their independence by essentially intimating that a woman's ultimate drive, whether for good or ill or in between, is dependent on motherhood in some form or another, without exception. (I can't get into more details without spoilers, but it really flattened what had been a batch of strong characters.) It all just felt like such a letdown after everything the characters went through to get there. The earlier promise and the terror of the cat-and-mouse (or dragon-and-princess) chases through the mountain caverns managed to barely keep the rating above a flat three stars, but it was a close call.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Dragon's Keep (Janet Lee Carey) - My Review
Seraphina (Rachel Hartman) - My Review
Dragon's Bait (Vivian Vande Velde) - My Review

Carl's Doomsday Scenario (Matt Dinniman)

Carl's Doomsday Scenario
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Book 2
Matt Dinniman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Coast Guard veteran Carl and his cat companion, Princess Donut, along with Donut's new dinosaur pet Mongo, have made it to the third level of the dungeon in the "game" that will determine humanity's fate on the planet they used to call home. They, and the diminishing number of other "crawlers", now have to decide which race they'll transform into (if they don't opt to remain human) and pick a class, decisions that may directly affect their odds of survival. But Carl and Donut both know by now that many of the choices in the game mean little when the powers behind it, and the greater field of galactic politics, are really pulling the strings. Even as they have no choice but to play out their roles, fighting monsters and gaining levels and figuring out the ever-evolving game mechanics, Carl and Donut are still determined to do everything they can to hold onto their decency and, if possible, break the system that's trying so very hard to break them.
This book also contains the second installment of "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret", an ongoing bonus story set elsewhere in the dungeons.

REVIEW: I never expected to enjoy the first book in this series as much as I did, and happily the sequel both lives up to the promise of the first one and builds on it brilliantly. Carl and Donut have both changed since they first ventured down the stairwell into the first level. Donut's intellectual evolution since gaining the ability to speak continues, as her thoughts grow more sophisticated, though there are still several blind spots, particularly regarding Carl's ex Bea (whom Donut still hopes will turn up someday and they can all be a family again, even as Carl knows the truth). Mongo, Donut's new pet, is also growing and leveling, becoming a useful asset to their little team. Their trainer Mordecai finds his role transformed from a mere trainer to someone who can provide more support, though he still has secrets related to his own run as a dungeon crawler and he may have his own agenda. And Carl himself struggles to juggle the many hats and obligations foisted onto him: celebrity dungeon crawler, co-conspirator with Mordecai, object of a creepy foot fetish by the dungeon-running AI (which might be going rogue), and (hopefully) survivor of a system so rigged that not a single "crawler" from a single species subjected to the cruel and twisted death gauntlet of the dungeons has ever succeeded and won the promised sovereignty of their home worlds back. He also picks up a few new allies and - naturally - more rivals, both within the game and without.
The level itself manages to not repeat the first floors too much, as Dinniman introduces new game mechanics and twists. The third floor brings not only the potential to permanently change species, but also quests and the dangerous "elite" class of non-player characters - which are, in true dungeon fashion, part of much larger franchises and interests, running semi-independently of the whole death-gauntlet-for-humanity main event; becoming entangled in one of their ongoing story arcs can make things infinitely more complicated and dangerous, but it might also lead to certain advantages if a crawler manages to play their cards right, and Carl and Donut both have clued into the need to play the game outside the dungeon at least as keenly as they play the one inside. The end lives up to the title, setting up even more explosive problems for the third installment.
As for the serialized bonus story, this one continues the tale as it explores some of the behind-the-scenes manipulations and mechanics, foreshadowing even greater problems in the making should any crawlers live long enough to encounter them. Even the NPCs are victims in the dungeons, only given enough tools and freedoms to develop a hatred of crawlers and both the willingness and ability to kill them.
The very slight dip in the ratings is simply due to the fact that this time I knew what I was getting when I picked it up, and didn't have that extra kick of surprise. It also flirts with excessive entanglements with all the players, species, factions, galactic powers, and other forces and their various complicated histories, all of which become increasingly important to Carl's and Donut's survival. It remains a very readable and highly enjoyable book, with much more to it than one might expect.

You Might Also Enjoy:
The Game of Sunken Places (M. T. Anderson) - My Review
Dungeon Crawler Carl (Matt Dinniman) - My Review
Otherland: City of Golden Shadow (Tad Williams) - My Review

The Dragon Quintet (Marvin Kaye, editor)

The Dragon Quintet
Marvin Kaye, editor
Tor
Fiction, Anthology/Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: Five short novels by top writers explore the wonders and dangers of dragons:
"In the Dragon's House," by Orson Scott Card: A storied Victorian house bedecked in gables and gargoyles holds a secret within its ancient wiring, a heartbeat and a whisper and waking dreams that speak to one orphaned boy.
"Judgment," by Elizabeth Moon: The human villager Ker doesn't know what to think when he spies the rocks that looked like eggs scattered along the path, but suspects they belong to the other folk, the people of stone or song, and are thus best left alone. When Elder Tam breaks one open to discover crystals within, a dark change overtakes the people... and only Ker and his mother seem immune.
"Love in a Time of Dragons," by Tanith Lee: An enslaved young woman lives a cold and brutal life until she glimpses her true love in the autumn forest, shortly before a warrior arrives to confront the drakkon that's plagued the area for centuries.
"Joust," by Mercedes Lackey: After dragon-riding invaders conquered his nation and turned the people into slaves or serfs, young Vetch has been filled with anger. But then a rider selects the boy as a new servant, to tend the needs of himself and his dragon... giving Vetch an unexpected opportunity for both freedom and, perhaps, vengeance.
"King Dragon," by Michael Swanwick: In a faerie world of magic and malice, young orphan Will is enthralled by the great iron war dragons that scream overhead... until one crashes in the nearby woods and becomes the cruel overlord of his village, recruiting him as its ambassador.

REVIEW: I found this anthology, originally published in 2004, for a very good (cheap) price at a local thrift store, so even though I have some mixed opinions on a few of the authors, I figured it was worth a try because dragons usually are worth a try. I shouldn't be too surprised that I had a mixed reaction to the stories within.
Orson Scott Card's tale is a long walk of a setup to a somewhat vague payoff in a way that makes me suspect that it was intended more as some manner of allegory or sermon than a story in and of itself. It takes a long time to get to even a hint of a dragon (save a gargoyle that dumps water on the sidewalk in front of the house after every rainstorm), and the boy Michael doesn't really do much or have much agency as he comes to understand his unusual bond with the old house and the energy humming through its walls. Much of the wordcount is devoted to the aging homeowners' love of theater and plays and how they take in foster children (Michael being one), but that all becomes so much wasted word count by the end. The dragon itself is an interesting concept, but generally too vague to really invest in.
"Judgment", set in a world of primitive villages and fae beings (and, of course, dragons), delivers a stronger story. Young Ker initially only hopes to earn the goodwill of the respected elder Tam, whose daughter Lin he intends to marry, but the moment he spies the peculiar "rocks" he knows they're bad luck, while Tam reveals a selfish, greedy streak at the thought of the "pretties" that may be within. This is a world where magic and luck aren't just abstractions, and there are very real reasons for the superstitions that abound in the people's lives, very real and powerful entities about that might take offense and inflict real harm. A fair bit happens, though the ending feels a little unfinished, as though Moon intended to expand it or write more. (I'm not familiar enough with her works to know if she ever did, or if this was a spinoff of an existing world or series.)
Tanith Lee's entry paints a vivid portrait of desperation, cruelty, and almost otherworldly wonder and danger in the tale of Graynne, who has been used and abused terribly in her young life, and finally takes a desperate chance to chase love and freedom by following a handsome would-be dragon slayer... but not all is as it initially seems. It feels somewhat long for the tale it's telling, wallowing at several points rather than progressing, and there's something dark and twisted but also cathartic at its heart. Lee uses language brilliantly here, particularly in the descriptions and in the last parts as she evokes a time jump with subtle terminology shifts.
With an Egyptian-flavored fantasy setting, "Joust" should've been more interesting, but everything seems to work out forever in Vetch's favor despite lip service given to long odds and difficulties, robbing the story of its tension. Yes, he starts out a serf to a cruel landowner (the first of many flat characters), but he's quickly plucked away by the world's kindest and most understanding dragon rider, who has a coincidentally unusual backstory and philosophy that basically hands Vetch a blueprint for his own freedom on a silver platter, and despite being new to the world of dragons and being ostracized by other dragon-boys he excels at everything he puts his hands on. It struck me quite early on that it felt familiar somehow, and then I realized that, in essence, Lackey had just given a light massage to the basic story of Jane Yolen's Pit Dragon books - in which an enslaved boy steals a dragon egg from his master, training it in secret for the pit fights that are the only path out of poverty on his desert world, only Jakkin faced steeper odds and setbacks and took far greater risks - with a light touch of Pern and a dash of Dick King-Smith's children's book The Cuckoo Child, about a bird-loving boy who steals an ostrich egg from the zoo to raise at the family farm (only again, the boy Jack Daw and ostrich Oliver encounter more obstacles and stumbles than Vetch). Lackey later expanded the idea of this novella into a series, but if this story is any indication, I've already read it all elsewhere. Even the titular dragon "jousting" barely enters into it. There are a few nice descriptions along the way, and maybe if I hadn't read the other books it borrowed so heavily from I'd have been more invested (or if something had actually gone wrong or been complicated enough to create genuine tension), but overall I found it too derivative to be interesting.
I have only read one book by Michael Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, which shares a universe with this tale. I did not like The Iron Dragon's Daughter, despite some intriguing ideas, but it was a long time ago when I read it; perhaps, I thought, I just wasn't ready for the story he was telling. Perhaps it was a younger me that felt so utterly repulsed by the ugly subtexts of his world and its hateful, sadistic, monstrous dragons. Well, if it was just me then, it's still just me now. While Swanwick weaves a suitably surreal fairy realm - the sort that hearkens back to older, stranger, colder ideas of fae magicks and ways - I was just plain sickened by much of what occurred there, and did not like anyone or anything I encountered in it, least of all the beastly dragon (let alone Will)... and that's not even getting into the unsubtle rape themes. This is a world that can kiss a basilisk full on the lips and burn to ash and probably be a more pleasant place for it.
At the end, editor Marvin Kaye discusses more dragons in various media... but he not only confesses ignorance about one of the most popular draconic franchises of the time (Anne McCaffrey's Pern series, still classics to a degree), and further mentions a couple movies just because he dislikes them, but then he provides a selection of recommended dragon media that is... quite eclectic. For instance, 1962's Harryhausenesque (but not actually the work of stop-motion FX master Ray Harryhausen) family fantasy romp Jack the Giant Killer (which I've seen brilliantly riffed by the Rifftrax crew - highly recommended, and the movie's entertaining enough, of a bit goofy and thin on logic, to keep one interested on its own) barely features a dragon at all. The websites are, as one might expect more than twenty years after this book was published, largely defunct, save "urbandragons.com", which appears to be a fossil site that hasn't been updated in quite some time. There were many great dragon websites back in the day I would've recommended over this one, though most have long gone to the Wayback Machine.
In any event, having only paid a couple of bucks, I can't say I'm too disappointed in my reading choice here. The five stories did, at least, all feature actual dragons (not "pseudo-dragons" or "dragons within" or other dodges I've seen passed off as dragon stories in other anthologies), and they each are distinctive in their own ways, even if I wasn't fond of the tales themselves. Some of the imagery does linger. But I still found myself wishing for better...

You Might Also Enjoy:
We Three Dragons (Bill Fawcett, editor) - My Review
A Diversity of Dragons (Anne McCaffrey with Richard Woods) - My Review
Here, There Be Dragons (Jane Yolen) - My Review

February Site Update

February's over already? For a short month, it sure was far too Eventful... Anyway, the main Brightdreamer Books site has been updated, with February's three reviews archived and cross-linked to related titles. (Yes, apparently the new job has had a negative effect on available reading time.)

Enjoy!

The Cautious Travellers's Guide to the Wastelands (Sarah Brooks)

The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands
Sarah Brooks
Flatiron Books
Fiction, Fantasy
*** (Okay)

DESCRIPTION: In the 1800s, a great change overtook Siberia, altering the landscape and birthing monsters and driving survivors mad as often as it killed them. Walls were built to protect civilization, shutting out the Wastelands and their wildness. But in losing Siberia, Russia and China - and, therefore, the world - lost a lucrative trade route. Thus, half a century later and after countless false starts and setbacks (and deaths), the Trans-Siberian Company built an immense train like no other, laying iron rails across the shifting landscape from Moscow to Beijing, and becoming perhaps the most powerful business in the hemisphere. Now trade flows again, and the elite see the Wastelands as just another tourist destination, for all that setting foot off the train is forbidden and "incidents" are still known to happen. The now-classic travel guide, Rostov's The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands, has brought many a curiosity seeker to the rails... though many ignore the author's warnings that the Wastelands will always change that which passes through them.
Marya's father used to supply the glass for the Trans-Siberian Company train, a very unique and demanding formula designed to keep the transformative, toxic influences of the wilderness away from the cargo and paying passengers. But something went terribly wrong on the last journey, something that nearly ended the service for good, even though not a single person aboard remembers just what. All the Company knew is that they needed someone to blame, and they decided that person should be Marya's father. He died from the shame and loss of face... and, perhaps, something else, something he contracted during that fateful incident. The Company took all his notes and papers, but Marya is determined to clear his name, for her own sake if nobody else's. Armed with a new identity and Rostov's tome, she steps aboard...
Weiwei was born in Third Class to a mother who died shortly afterwards, and has lived her whole young life on the train, attuned to its rhythms and moods in a way even the Captain is not. The Wastelands fascinate and scare her, for all that their strangeness is as familiar to her as her own heartbeat. She feared her beloved home, the train, would never move again after that last terrible, unremembered trip, and is thrilled when it's returned to service... but something is off-kilter long before the behemoth leaves Beijing. The normal rituals have not been performed. The Captain, normally a constant and steadfast presence, is locked away in her cabin rather than reassuring her crew. And there's a peculiar presence in the cargo carriage. Is it the Wasteland playing tricks on her mind, as it plays tricks with the minds of so many people? Or is something from outside already on board?
Henry Grey was a promising naturalist until he was humiliated in front of his peers for a dreadful error while presenting his ideas on natural mimicry, but he has a plan for an audacious comeback. He has a theory that, unlike what many people think, the Wastelands are not a land of unknowable chaos and possible diabolic influence, but a window into the dawn of Creation and a crucible in which God's own will might be glimpsed, if only someone will be bold enough to study it scientifically and without superstition. If he could bring a few specimens to present at the grand Exhibition in Moscow, he would redeem his reputation and launch a scientific revolution, he is sure. The Company has very strict policies about those who attempt to exit the train in the Wastelands, let alone try to bring items from it on board: they are willing to not only submit the violators to "train justice" by tossing them off the moving cars, but will seal away and allow to perish entire train fulls of people if there is the least suspicion that contamination from outside has gotten in. But great discoveries demand great risk.
These three lives, and many more, will be utterly transformed in this fateful journey across Siberia.

REVIEW: This was the second book I picked up during my last Barnes and Noble trip (the other being Dungeon Crawler Carl); I wanted something different in tone, and the blurb promised wonderful and strange things. (That, and it was a standalone, which is nice now and again.) While I tore through Dungeon Crawler Carl like a parched camel at an oasis, this one took longer to get through. It was the reading equivalent of a strange dish served at a high-end concept restaurant, where there's nothing objectively wrong with it, but I found the service somewhat cold and distant, the ingredients confusing, and the taste hard to describe, making for a generally unsatisfying, if still admittedly different and interesting, experience.
Set in an alternate-history mid-19th century, there's a bit of a steampunk vibe in the immense train and the clash of cold, cruel corporate powers against wild nature that refuses to conform to human ideas or fit into human logic or reason; the very landscape changes between one trip and the next, with colors that can induce madness and creatures that seem half-ethereal and half-demonic. It's little wonder that many people and some churches see the Wastelands as a portal to Hell; many people lost their lives during the unexplained event that transformed Siberia, and despite the massive Walls protecting China and Russia there are still opportunists and rebels who attempt to enter the wilderness only to be driven mad or unmade by the forces at work. To even conceive of a transit like the Trans-Siberian Company train is the epitome of hubris, fueled by the epitome of greed, and after half a century of more-or-less success, it has led to the epitome of arrogance as the Company ignores the warning of the previous trip and sends their train out across the Wastelands again, perfectly willing to sacrifice its crew and passengers in the name of profit and the appearance of total domination over the land, an appearance badly shaken in the public eye by that last incident.
What was the incident? What actually happened? Nobody knows, and only glimpses are ever remembered. The Wastelands cannot, do not, and will not fit into human perceptions, let alone human descriptions. At first, this creates an intriguing mystery, along with the bizarre, half-glimpsed, half-suggested nature of the altered Siberia through which the train travels. At some point, though, forever being told that the characters (and thus the reader) cannot possibly comprehend what happened, what is happening, and what could or will happen becomes a tiresome dodge. If it's all too metaphysical and grand for me to understand any of what's happening, or why, then why should I care?
"Who cares?" became my mental refrain by the halfway point, and mostly persisted to the end. Marya, under an assumed name (lest the Company figure out who she is and what she aims to do, defy their declaration that her father was to blame and prove something else went wrong with their precious train), frets that she'll be found out by the "Crows" - company agents - or the other passengers more than she actively seeks evidence... but who cares what she finds, when I couldn't care much about her? Weiwei discovers a stowaway of sorts that smacks of Wastelands through and through (it takes place early on, so hardly a spoiler), yet still - in defiance of everything drilled into her from her first breath, in defiance of her loyalty to the captain, in defiance to sheer human instinct - decides that she's imagining the oddness... so who cares when "Elena" turns out to be more than she seems? And who cares what Elena's motives are? And Henry Grey, a man so blinded by religious conviction and hubris that he's as fanatical in his own determination that Siberia is a "New Eden" as the Russian cleric who spends the whole trip preaching about hellfire and brimstone, such a flat caricature of an obsessed zealot who is so obviously going to do something monumentally stupid to endanger everyone... but who cares? I never really liked any of the characters, and only occasionally found them interesting; they were all prone to paralysis in the face of decision and boneheaded actions when intelligence was called for (not always, but enough times to induce a few eye rolls).
Anyway, eventually things happen, more or less, building to an utterly surreal and drawn-out finale that featured some remarkably bizarre imagery, but which ultimately was so strange I'm not entirely sure it wasn't all meant to be a fever dream anyway. I'd say some parts of the ending felt unearned for some characters, but that would require me to have cared much about them by that point, and I generally did not.
If you're a fan of surreal alternate histories, the clash of man and machine against chaotic and untameable life, or tales with strong metaphysical and religious subtexts, and you don't mind a somewhat distancing narrative voice that can't always show or tell readers what's actually going on or why, you'll likely enjoy A Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands more than I did. As it is, while I can't say I hated it, and while I can't say it didn't deliver on its promised surreal aspects with some distinct and vivid imagery, it just plain was not my cup of cocoa.

You Might Also Enjoy:
Senlin Ascends (Josiah Bancroft) - My Review
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Dungeon Crawler Carl (Matt Dinniman)

Dungeon Crawler Carl
The Dungeon Crawler Carl series, Book 1
Matt Dinniman
Ace
Fiction, Fantasy/Humor/Sci-Fi
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: Coast Guard veteran Carl didn't know the world was going to end when he ran out of his Seattle apartment in his boxers and too-small pink Crocs, trying to catch his ex-girlfriend's purebred Persian show cat, Princess Donut. If he had, he'd have at least put on pants. But suddenly his apartment building was just... gone. Squashed out of existence in a blink. Just like every other artificial structure around the world, along with anyone unfortunate enough to be inside them, leaving him standing in the freezing January cold with an angry cat in his arms.
Then a voice speaks in his head, along with letters floating before his eyes. Apparently, a galactic bureaucracy has decided that humans failed to properly claim their home as a sovereign nation, so the Borant Corporation has arrived to take possession and strip its raw materials. However, they're willing to give our species a chance to reclaim the planet... if anyone survives eighteen levels of a dungeon-like reality game that have just been built underground. Oh, and the Syndicate broadcasts these events to trillions of viewers, with every move and word under constant surveillance, so do try to keep the essential extinction of humanity interesting for the sake of ratings, or there will be further consequences.
Carl likes a good video game as much as anyone else, but he doesn't want to live through one, let alone carry along Princess Donut, whom he can hardly abandon to the post-apocalyptic conditions on the surface. So when he sees a staircase appear, he ventures down, little suspecting what awaits him as a "crawler" once he enters the first level. Monsters, loot boxes, boss battles, snarky in-game achievements, an all-powerful AI dungeon master with a foot fetish, a cat who can suddenly talk and cast magic missiles from her eyes... all this, and more too, lies ahead if he can manage to survive. Beneath it all, he'll find a tangle of politics and clashing agendas that may spell the end of every living human - or provide unexpected opportunities to cheat the system and the game-runners out of their prize.

REVIEW: It's almost impossible not to hear about this explosively popular series in fantasy reading circles these days, but I wasn't sure it would be my thing. After all, I've been disappointed by popular series before, and I couldn't work out if it would be too crude for my tastes, if it was a one-trick pony of a book, or if the humor wouldn't land (as there are few things worse than comedy that isn't hitting the funny bone). But my new job hasn't exactly gotten off to a spectacular start, and I needed to remind myself that walking into a building full of books need not trigger an automatic gut-clench of anxiety, plus I still had a holiday gift card to burn off at Barnes and Noble. So I wandered in one fateful day and walked out with two titles, one of them Dungeon Crawler Carl... and by that night I'd already devoured over 100 pages. It's been so long since a book grabbed me that fast that I'd forgotten what it felt like.
How did it feel? Good. It felt very, very good.
Some writers, dealing with gaming and fan-adjacent subjects, are clearly observing from the sidelines, having maybe seen a picture of a con or walked past someone playing a game and decided that they could fill out the rest with assumptions and stereotypes and humor that's thinly-disguised mockery (borderline bullying in some instances). From the outset, it's clear that Dinnman is not one of those authors. He understands games and gaming and the culture around them from the inside, and he's laughing with, not at, devotees, in the vein of Galaxy Quest's take on sci-fi fandom. As someone who grew up with the Commodore (still considered the top gaming computer for having the most game titles on its platform, last I looked) and who still enjoys gaming (even if I haven't been able to indulge for a while, in no small part due to life being a dumpster fire loaded with tiny dumpster fires adrift in a sea of fiery dumpsters), this put me squarely in Dungeon Crawler Carl's target demographic. From the snarky in-game descriptors and asides to the stats and the level grinding, this is gaming written by a gamer through and through. (A real gamer, who enjoys playing the game for its own sake, not a hate gamer... there is a difference.) The game itself also reveals much about the creators and how they're spinning the extermination of people on Earth.
But there's much more going on than just looting and leveling and sarcastic in-game achievement announcements. Even in the midst of the absurdity, Carl feels the weight of the end of the world. When he looks at Princess Donut, he can't help remembering his ex Beatrice... who is probably dead, along with everyone else he remembers from his old life. As he watches the numbers of "crawlers" drop each evening with the recap broadcasts, he knows what that means about the population of Earth and the fates of his fellow humans, even the ones whose grisly deaths don't make the highlight reels. There's grief and rage and a desperate need to cling to some manner of humanity in a situation engineered to punish empathy. When he comes across a group of refugees from a nursing home, he's told more than once that abandoning them is the wiser choice if he wants to level up high enough to survive the next dungeon down. (Every dungeon level collapses after a certain time, meaning death for anyone who opts to not play or simply doesn't make it to a stairwell... each of which is guarded by a boss monster, of course.) He also encounters crawlers who, like some gamers, decide the best way to level up is picking off fellow gamers for experience points, even when the "competition" is not just pixel avatars on a screen but living, breathing human beings just trying to survive the end of the world. As Carl gets deeper into the "game" and starts encountering some of the administrators running/profiting off the dungeons, and later the third parties (other galactic clans and factions, talk show hosts, and more), he gets the bigger picture of just how massive the machine is that perpetuates atrocities like the one he's experiencing, the profiteering off genocide and the encouragement of more and more sick and brutal displays of power over the powerless, a self-perpetuating engine of escalating horrors. There are strong shades of The Hunger Games (and too many incidents in the real world) here...
I also need to make a few notes about Princess Donut. Dinniman displays some decent understanding of cat showing with her; Donut is a grand champion with numerous ribbons, and she knows it, but there's more to her than just a prima donna (or the standard, lazy stereotype that cats are selfish and hate everyone). Once she gains the power of speech, she becomes a decently rounded character in her own right. Yes, she's got absurdly high charisma (if at the cost of a weakened constitution), she can be vain, and she yearns for attention, but she's also a solid companion and loyal to Carl, and the two become a true team in their journeys as they figure out how to balance their strengths and weaknesses. She even comes around to assisting Carl when he chooses to attempt kindness and compassion over the brutality the game constantly encourages in its crawlers, and she grows as a character even in the space of this book. They succeed (or occasionally fail) together.
There are other characters, of course, some set up as villains and some as potential friends, but most everyone has a hidden side or complications that round them and their motives out. Hints are given about how other extinction "games" have gone; the Borant Corporation is but one of several galactic superpowers who conquer unsuspecting planets and make their natives run a rigged gauntlet on the feeblest promises of survival, all for "entertainment" and profit. (They pretty much admit that the actual value of the minerals they take is barely a drop in the bucket.) Much of this, of course, will likely come more into play as the series progresses, but enough is set up here to be intriguing and add extra complications and weight to many situations Carl and Princess Donut face in their involuntary dungeon crawl.
At the end, Dinniman offers part one of an ongoing story about one of the side characters encountered, further fleshing out not only the world of the game creators and the crawlers but the "monsters", who are all reshaped and repurposed beings forced to endure the games as well, offering further hints of machinations behind the scenes that will bear fruit further down the line.
If there's any real downside, it may be some of the time spent explaining the game mechanics and other minutiae to the reader and Carl, as his "trainer" Mordecai - himself a survivor of his own world's version of the games - fills in details. I expect anyone who hasn't grown up steeped in games with stat screens and skill trees would be confused or bored by the focus on this. Otherwise, I can't think of any drawbacks worth noting.
I was a little on the fence about whether to go with a four-and-a-half star rating. The Great rating is one I don't tend to hand out willy-nilly; there needs to be that extra something to kick a book over the top. The full fifth star was awarded not just because I stayed up late to finish, but because, at 12:05 AM, I was seriously contemplating ordering the next book in the series instead of going to bed. Maybe I'll just have to get back to Barnes and Noble with my next paycheck, assuming life doesn't devour it all before I can get there. The way work has been going, I'm going to need another reminder soon that rooms of books can be pleasant companions...

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The Mercy of Gods (James S. A. Corey)

The Mercy of Gods
The Captive's War series, Book 1
James S. A. Corey
Orbit
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: It was a night of triumph, at least for one small group of elite researchers and students at Dyan Academy on the planet Anjiin... and it was also the beginning of the end of their world. While Tonner and his group celebrate their groundbreaking discovery, reconciling the DNA of native Anjiin life forms with those descended from the long-lost homeworld of the humans, academic politics and rivalries threaten to split the team and the fruits of their labors. But even those matters seem trivial when a peculiar spacial anomaly, only recently detected with another breakthrough project, turns out to be something far less benign than a simple natural phenomenon.
The empire of the Carryx spans countless star systems and encompasses innumerable subjugated species... and those are just the ones that the vaguely insectlike titans find "useful" in their inscrutable minds. Those who are not useful are eliminated with no more thought or remorse than swatting a gnat, and little more effort.
When the Carryx ships descend upon Anjiin, they conquer the planet in under a week. As for the humans, their fate will be decided soon enough. The Carryx take the top talents from around the globe - not just scientists, but politicians, soldiers, artists, and more - back to their home planet, setting each a task at which they must succeed to prove their worth, and the worth of the whole of Anjiin.
As Tonner and the Dyan scholars struggle with the seemingly-impossible job they've been given, Dafyd - always something of an outsider, more a political animal than an academic one - begins to look at his new surroundings in a different way. There must be some uniting philosophy and purpose behind the seemingly random mishmash of alien species he sees around him, something that could unlock the psyche of their Carryx overlords. And if he can figure out what makes their civilization work, he's halfway to figuring out how to tear it all down.

REVIEW: I enjoyed Corey's Expanse series (the books, the TV series, and what little of the extended graphic novel universe I've read), so I was eager to get my hands on their newest sci-fi adventure. While it did deliver a similar grand idea and epic scope, ultimately I didn't connect with the story or the characters in the way I'd hoped to.
The opening sets the stage for the whole book, taking place at a high-end university where top-flight researchers and science students are both celebrating a breakthrough in a complex and esoteric field of study and watching their backs for the knives of rivals. Only Dafyd is an outsider among them, though he's a researcher in his own way, mind geared more toward politics and what drives the people around him (and how they might be manipulated if need be). It's the sort of world I've never had a mind for and never been a part of, and to be honest I wasn't that thrilled about my choice of characters to experience it with. I expect I'd have related a lot more had I been more familiar wit academia, with the sort of obsessive brilliance (and possible mild-to-moderate dysfunction) that drives certain people to extreme bleeding edges of their field and the environment that creates. Around this cast, I could see an intriguing world built by descendants of colonists, one that has adapted in some unusual ways and yet still is alien to this planet that they've called home for generations, long enough that any trace of their extraterrestrial origins (save the knowledge that they were, indeed, from another world) has been lost. It's for this that I kept reading.
Eventually, the invaders make landfall and the story begins to properly take off... after another slow stint during transportation, a stretch where minds are bent to the point of breaking in some cases and where the true nature of their predicament, how utterly helpless and outmatched the humans are against their captors, is driven home. Once on the Carryx homeworld (or a world that's far more home to the aliens than the humans), the tale takes more turns, though it still ultimately centers around science and labwork in a way that kept me at arm's length. Still, there were more "shiny objects" to keep me interested. The many aliens and peculiar, inhuman nature of the world have an old-school sense of wonder (a bit of a throwback vibe, not unlike sci-fi centered on scientists doing science) alongside a certain omnipresent dread. The Carryx and other aliens never feel too human, with their own agendas and psychologies that aren't as one-dimensional as they might seem from the outside, which means that they can never truly be trusted.
Alone of the Dyad scientists, Dafyd works to unravel the secrets of their captors and the other species around him. He hopes that doing so will show him a way out, but it's only when he encounters another enemy of his new keepers - a swarmlike entity sent by another interplanetary species that's fighting the Carryx - that he might finally make some progress... but at a cost he doesn't fully grasp until it's too late to turn back. Meanwhile, the rest of the team slowly become more distinct and interesting, even if they weren't always likable. As they try to complete the task the Carryx set for them, they find themselves beset by innumerable obstacles, from inadequate equipment to meddling outsiders to internal schisms exacerbated by captivity and worsening mental health on all their parts.
The finale wraps up some of the storylines while setting up the greater arc and the next book in the series... a book I'm on the fence about continuing, even knowing that one half of James S. A. Corey (the Daniel Abraham half) tends to write to series arcs and can't therefore necessarily be judged adequately on a single book in a given series. Part of me can't help but be intrigued, though.
There are many things to enjoy and admire in this book. As mentioned, it feels a little like an updated throwback, ideas and science painted on a galactic scale. I did also ultimately appreciate the complicated psyches and drives behind the different characters, human and otherwise. There are also several things that just didn't resonate with me, and even when I appreciated their drives I generally never felt invested in the characters. I think if I were more immersed in academia and the world of university researchers I'd have clicked better with it. As it is, I confess I'm probably just not the real target audience here.

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January Site Update

Is it too late to return the unused portion of 2026 for a refund? The main Brightdreamer Books page has been updated with the month's reviews, including the last audiobooks I'll likely be able to get to for some time. (As for the new job... I'm hoping it just got off on the wrong foot and it'll get better, though I made sure to update my resume in case it doesn't.)

Enjoy!

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Becky Chambers)

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
The Wayfarer series, Book 1
Becky Chambers
Harper Voyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Rosemary used to live in the lap of luxury on Mars, but now has given up everything she ever had to get away from her family and old life, joining the crew of the spacecraft Wayfarer as a clerk. It's a patched-up vessel with a crew as mismatched as its parts, from the eccentric tech Kizzy to her partner Jenks, who has fallen in love with the shipboard AI Lovelace, from Dr. Chef - one of the last members of a species slowly going extinct after a genocidal civil war - to Ohan, a Sianat Pair infected with a Whisperer virus that enables great genius at the cost of a shortened lifespan. There's also an Aandrisk pilot, Sissix, and a grouchy human algaeist, Corbin, managing the fuel vats. Rosemary can't help feeling overwhelmed, given that she's barely set foot off a planet before, but Captain Ashby and the crew (well, most of them, save Corbin) go out of their way to make her feel welcome.
When a new species near the galaxy's core - the Toremi, a highly isolationist and clannish species most known for fighting each other to the death over any disagreement - is granted entry into the Galactic Commons of intelligent races, establishing a new wormhole tunnel will be a critical first step to establishing trade and strong diplomatic ties: a lucrative job for any wormhole-punching vessel. Though humans are still considered lesser members of the Commons, Captain Ashby manages to land the gig for the Wayfarer. It'll be a long standard-year of travel to reach the new world, if a short jump back boring a new wormhole through subspace, and long hauls are the kind of trips to make or break a crew, especially when complicated by pirates, bureaucratic barriers, equipment malfunctions, and dark secrets ripped into the open at the worst possible times.

REVIEW: This is another book with personal significance. The novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate was the first audiobook I listened to at my current job - a job I left as of today, transferring to a new role. (There's a long, irrelevant story behind that...) My new job is less likely to allow for the copious audiobook time that I've grown used to, especially not when I'm still learning the ropes. So, to close out my long stretch of listening, I decided to bookend things with this, another Becky Chambers title. It, too, was enjoyable, if a little light on plot.
This is very much a character-driven tale, to the point where there's not too much else binding the events together save the crew's interactions with each other and a few offworlders encountered along the way. For the most part, these are interesting enough to entertain, as everyone has hidden facets and flaws that provide friction now and again, and they all undergo some growth or challenge along the way. Rosemary, a newcomer to the ship in particular and interstellar travel in general, becomes a convenient way for Chambers to explain her milieu to the reader, though Rosemary is far from helpless or useless, just somewhat naïve. And there is a general story arc involved, if a thin one, as the mixed-species crew of the Wayfarer travels to the homeworld of the newest member of the Galactic Commons... but are these Toremi really ready to join the multitude of starfaring races, when only one clan among them has accepted Galactic Commons membership and is still warring with others of its kind? During the Wayfarer's trip, the crew encounter various ways that different species (and members within species; these are not monolithic cultures) view and interact with each other, and even on their own ship there can be stumbles and misunderstandings. Some of the crewmembers seem unevenly developed, though, and don't quite get a full arc or follow-through even after some revelations and transformative moments. Corbin in particular is a flat, grumbling nobody for far too long, and Kizzy's kooky eccentricity wanders erratically between endearing and annoying. Some of their stopovers along the way also overstay their welcome and plot relevance, though this is very much a book where the journey is far more than half the point. The climax feels rushed, shoehorned in to provide drama, with inadequate buildup on a few points (that I can't get into without spoilers). The ending is reasonably satisfying, but also feels like it's partway through some larger journey... and, from what I can tell from blurbs, it looks like the rest of the series wanders away from the Wayfarer (despite the series being named after the ship), so I'm unlikely to find closure on those fronts if I read on.
Still, for all that I sometimes got a little antsy wishing the story would just get on with things already and stop lingering so long over little moments and philosophical discussions and quirky characters being quirky, I will say I remained interested and entertained for the most part as I listened to it, which was enough to keep The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet at a four-star Good rating. On another day, in another mood, I could see where I might be extra-harsh and trim it a half-star, but not today.

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Greenteeth (Molly O'Neill)

Greenteeth
Molly O'Neill
Orbit
Fiction, Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: For one thousand years, Jenny Greenteeth has lived in the lake besides the little town of Chipping Appleby, tending the water plants and tidying the lake bed and only eating the occasional interloper. When a witch is thrown into her waters, bound with burning iron, Jenny thinks perhaps she's expected to end the mortal's life quickly... but this woman seems to have true power, and Jenny does not at all like the looks of the priestly figure who tossed the witch to her doom. She rescues Temperance and brings her to her cave beneath the waters. There, the witch tells Jenny of the wicked parson who seems to have bewitched her neighbors, convincing them to turn on her when once they were friendly. Together, Jenny and the witch hatch a plan to strike back... but find something far, far more dangerous than either anticipated within the skin of the holy man, something that could doom the whole country if left unchecked. In desperation, they seek help from Gwyn ap Nuud, king of the high fae and one-time leader of the Wild Hunt, and are charged with three seemingly impossible tasks as the price for his assistance - but if they fail, both mortals and immortals will suffer under the heel of the monstrous Erl King.

REVIEW: "Cozy" fantasy seems to be having a moment these days, and Greenteeth might roughly fall into that category as it focuses on the budding friendship between a not-quite-monstrous monster and a good witch, though in other ways it hearkens back to more traditional fantasies built around quests and elder-day magic that's fading away in an increasingly modern and human-dominated world.
The titular Jenny is a water monster, a green womanlike figure possessing great strength, nigh-immortality, the ability to breathe underwater, and multiple rows of very sharp teeth. "Jenny Greenteeth" is a traditional folklore creature of the British Isles, kin to pixies and hobgoblins, and this particular Jenny has been one so long that she no longer recalls if she had another identity or name. If she even thinks about her past at all, she assumes she was created in the same way that she herself once created a daughter from a drowned human infant. She's a solitary being, keeping her "household" beneath the lake nice and tidy with a pike as a sort-of pet, and she generally doesn't bother the nearby humans, who seem to have forgotten that they even have a lake beast... at least, so it seems, until they rudely drop a witch into her domain. Some twinge of compassion causes her to spare the woman's life, as much as a dislike of the parson who riled up the locals into a froth of anti-witch sentiment. But Jenny is not, and should never be mistaken for, human. She may have empathy and even be capable of kindness, but when need be, or when pushed, she's quite capable of putting her claws and teeth to bloody use; the traditional Jenny Greenteeth isn't known for her vegan diet, after all. Temperance the witch is initially, naturally, terrified, but her despair and anger, plus her determination to get back to her beloved husband and children and get them out of the parson's foul clutches, lead her into what starts as an uneasy truce with Jenny. When Temperance needs special ingredients for a spell as part of her attempted counterstrike against the wicked parson, Jenny calls upon Brackus, a traveling goblin merchant with a trickster streak and a bottomless bag of various goodies. It isn't long before Brackus is drawn deeper into the problem, when it becomes clear that there's a greater supernatural threat embodied in the parson that endangers the magical realm as well as the mundane - and the magical realm is already in trouble, slowly fading as the world ages. Indeed, the faerie king no longer even rides forth as he used to, content to preside over a diminishing court that was once the feared Wild Hunt; even the promise of a quarry like the legendary Erl King is insufficient to stir him from his retirement. Instead, he sets three seemingly-impossible quests out of legend before the trio seeking his aid, and even if they succeed, all he promises is advice, not active help. Still, it's better than nothing, which is what they have when facing the enemy in Chipping Appleby.
As Jenny, Temperance, and Brackus, along with some help from the faerie-touched hound Cavall (on loan from the faerie queen, Lady Creiddylad, who offers more tangible help than the king but is still constrained by his rules), set forth to fulfill the lord's requests, they travel the length and breadth of an elder England, seeing for themselves how magic and the memory of magic has faded in the centuries since Camelot stood. The three clash more than once, but adversity inevitably begets friendship, and Jenny even comes to appreciate Brackus despite his sometimes-irritating optimism.
There are a few points where the personal clashes feel a bit drawn out, as when Jenny and Temperance settle into a feud spurred by a petty misunderstanding that festers out of proportion; this primarily happens to force a plot-relevant event, and struck me as mildly manipulative on the author's part. The ties to Camelot and Arthur become more pronounced as the tale unfolds; it works for the most part, though I sometimes get tired of King Arthur as the inevitable go-to touchstone legend. For the most part, though, it's a fairly satisfying tale, evoking the spirit of questing fairy tales, even though the wrap-up feels slightly too neat and tidy. Being a standalone title helps, as it doesn't ever overstay its welcome or its premise.

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Dragonfruit (Makiia Lucier)

Dragonfruit
Makiia Lucier
Clarion Books
Fiction, YA Fantasy
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Seadragons are the great wonder and wealth of the Nominomi Sea, and the terror of many a ship. Their scales can be fashioned into nigh-impenetrable armor. Their flesh can be rendered into pure oil that burns brighter and cleaner than anything else. A stew made from their eyes can restore lost vigor and youth. Every part of the great beasts is worth at least its weight in gold. But it's their eggs, known as dragonfruit, that are most coveted and rarest seen. Consuming a dragonfruit, the old stories say, can erase one great sorrow from your life... but to do so is to risk the anger of the sea god, who will exact a terrible price. Sometimes, though, for the truly desperate and lost and heartbroken, the risk is worth the reward.
As a girl, Hanalei was a page to the queen of the wealthy Tamarind Islands... and, like the queen, fell victim to a terrible poison that induced a comalike slumber. Three seadragon eggs were brought in the hopes that they could provide a cure. But an accident destroyed two eggs, and Hanalei's father, a loyal soldier, turned traitor and stole the last egg, whisking it and his his stricken daughter away from the Tamarinds. The cure worked, but it cost the father his life, and made them both exiles from their homeland.
Ten years later, Hanalei wanders the Nominomi Sea. She studies the dwindling population of seadragons, selling her sketches and observations to the handful of scholars who want to understand the wonders of the Nominomi, but always the hunters and the foreigners seem to get there first. But she has an advantage they do not; ever since her cure, she has been able to sense the great beasts. Though she tries to keep it secret, one dragoner captain, Bragadin of the Anemone, works it out and takes her captive as he hunts for a gravid seadragon. Passing near the Tamarinds, she takes a chance to escape, even knowing she'll probably be seen as the unwelcome daughter of a traitor. Instead, she finds an old childhood friend, Prince Samahtitamahenele (or Sam), who tells her the queen, his mother, still sleeps her poisoned sleep. When a fresh seadragon nest is found on the island, Hanalei has a chance to undo her late father's mistake and secure a dragonfruit to cure the queen - but others covet the eggs, and the Anemone is still lurking just beyond the boundary stones.

REVIEW: There's plenty to like about Dragonfruit, from its setting - refreshingly non-Eurocentric, based instead on cultures and mythologies of the Pacific Islands - to its dragons. There are also some niggling issues that almost (but not quite) cost it a half-star in the ratings.
The story doesn't drag its feet, opening with the legend of the dragonfruit and the eggs' miraculous powers and establishing its heroine Hanalei and the seadragons, as well as the threat of dragoner crews. Hanalei is a decently pro-active main character, not one prone to freezing up or sinking into useless despair and helplessness, though she isn't above mistakes. Her attempt to save the dragons lands her in the clutches of an old nemesis, Captain Bragadin of the Anemone. As a penniless orphan far from home after her father was killed and his money stolen, she wound up working in his oil processing facilities rendering dead seadragons, earning starvation wages and hands full of silvery scars from the obsidian-sharp scales, until she outgrew the job; small, nimble hands (and young, helpless children) are his preferred workforce on land, while his ship is full of the usual assortment of pirate thugs. He's almost stereotypical in his monstrous behavior, but he's clever enough to have figured out that there's a reason she seems to keep turning up whenever there are seadragons to be slain. So fixated is he on his hunt and the potential reward for a clutch of seadragon eggs that he endangers his entire ship fending off a potential rival. Hanalei manages to escape, only to be forced to confront her past, or rather the wreckage her father left behind while she was comatose from poison... and this is where the story morphs into its main form, after it seemed like it would be about Hanalei and the dragoner captain fighting over the fate of the seadragons and the eggs. (It's not much of a spoiler to say that the Anemone is not entirely out of the picture, but it is shifted to the back burner for a long stretch.)
Sam, for his part, has lived half his life under the shadow of a stricken mother. His grandmother currently wears the crown of the Tamarinds - theirs is a matrilinear culture, power passed from mother to daughter - but cannot rule indefinitely. Unless Sam's mother is cured, and soon, Sam will be expected to marry, a political arrangement to strengthen the islands' stance in a world where foreigners are increasingly intrusive, for all that the spices of the Tamarinds still give them some wealth and leverage. His heart is clearly not in it; he pines for his old childhood friend, for all that he does not think of their bond as love in the popular sense of the term. He also carries his mother's living "mark", a tattoolike animal that sometimes appears spontaneously on the skin of islanders and can become a living creature, something like a familiar, to carry out tasks and provide companionship. The fruit bat is a perpetual reminder of his ailing mother, both a comfort and a further burden. He never even got his year of travel in, an island tradition where men and women leave the Tamarinds for several months as the cross the threshold into adulthood. Unexpectedly finding Hanalei fleeing a dragoner ship right on his metaphoric doorstep is a surprise that brings up all sorts of complicated emotions, not to mention all sorts of problems. The names of her and her father are still raw wounds to many on the Tamarinds, particularly the noble houses who still bear the brunt of the man's decision to snatch away the queen's potential cure to save his own daughter; the fact that Hanalei was evidently cured, indicating that the queen, too, would've likely recovered if she'd received the egg instead, makes her return all the more painful. But bonds of family and love are deep and complicated... especially when Hanalei's return coincides with a potential new seadragon nest on the island, and thus a chance to atone for her father's selfish act. Her ability to sense the dragons themselves gives the islanders a slight advantage in tracking down the eggs, but there are many people who feel desperate for their own miracle, and thus many potential traitors... in theory.
Now we get to the parts that almost weighed the ratings down. The baddies and the shifty characters turn out to be far, far too obvious from their first appearances, to the point where it gets hard to believe that nobody in the cast even remotely suspects them. This doesn't just apply to the dragoner crew and foreigners, but to people that the characters know (theoretically) well on the island. There's also a sense of blunted corners and pulled punches that almost feels more like what one would find in a younger middle-grade novel, and some elements that are brought up and then completely dropped without followthrough or fleshing out. (Even the "romance", such as it is, is so mild that I wondered at the original target audience, if it was "aged up" for marketing reasons for a story aimed younger. Not that every teen book needs to drip with hormones, mind you, but something about just felt odd.) With that sense of bubble-wrapping comes a hint of "plot armor" where it becomes impossible to consider that any serious harm or inconvenience will ultimately hinder the main characters. (And, yes, that's not entirely uncommon, but it just seemed a little more obvious than it should've been, in the same way that one intellectually knows a movie isn't reality but it's harder to suspend disbelief when the boom mic keeps dropping into the frame. I kept seeing the boom mic here.)
Those issues aside, the story does move well, and I generally enjoyed it. It has many nice details and scenes that bring the islands and their unique magic to life. It's also a standalone, which is refreshing when so many books are series these days. I ultimately liked it enough to keep the rating afloat at four stars, though I'll admit it came close to dropping more than once.

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