anna_hepworth's review
1.0
I was a judge for the 2015 Aurealis Awards. This review is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of any judging panel, the judging coordinator or the Aurealis Awards management team.
I found this book uneven and derivative. I might have liked it better if it hadn't kept falling short of McCaffrey's early Pern books. In many ways, it read as Pern with griffins, including the overwhelmingly awful gender fuckups. At least McCaffrey had the excuse of writing in the 60s and 70s, and even then, Pern had women with agency, even if the settings were filled with fantasy-feudal mores.
Other complaints -- purple prose; murder is but set dressing; plots as a whole come across as naive, a bit simple, a bit lego-built fantasy; women as set dressing; writing and characters as a whole a bit ho hum. I got so bored. The rebellion reads as replacing one sociopath with another. Short stories shouldn't have cliffhangers. At points, this stopped being short stories, and moved more towards chapters.
Redeeming features: First story is reasonably paced for the complexity of the story, with really only the one story line, although told from multiple points. The world building is great, the subtleties of the showing bits of the world from different stories is great. One of the stories has a griffin viewpoint! The third section is about a different geographical area, and the change brought some interest back to the collection.
Stories worth reading:
Arren gets a tattoo - weirdly, this one grabbed my attention really quickly. And it was interesting to see the next step - unlike the Pern books, where the kid who shouldn't have a dragon/griffin gets one amount of bad treatment too many and then the bosses get involved. The ending was a bit weird, but I liked the devil's choice at the end.
The death of a city - a bit rushed, and relied a little too heavily on the previous stories, but still, it worked.
I found this book uneven and derivative. I might have liked it better if it hadn't kept falling short of McCaffrey's early Pern books. In many ways, it read as Pern with griffins, including the overwhelmingly awful gender fuckups. At least McCaffrey had the excuse of writing in the 60s and 70s, and even then, Pern had women with agency, even if the settings were filled with fantasy-feudal mores.
Other complaints -- purple prose; murder is but set dressing; plots as a whole come across as naive, a bit simple, a bit lego-built fantasy; women as set dressing; writing and characters as a whole a bit ho hum. I got so bored. The rebellion reads as replacing one sociopath with another. Short stories shouldn't have cliffhangers. At points, this stopped being short stories, and moved more towards chapters.
Redeeming features: First story is reasonably paced for the complexity of the story, with really only the one story line, although told from multiple points. The world building is great, the subtleties of the showing bits of the world from different stories is great. One of the stories has a griffin viewpoint! The third section is about a different geographical area, and the change brought some interest back to the collection.
Stories worth reading:
Arren gets a tattoo - weirdly, this one grabbed my attention really quickly. And it was interesting to see the next step - unlike the Pern books, where the kid who shouldn't have a dragon/griffin gets one amount of bad treatment too many and then the bosses get involved. The ending was a bit weird, but I liked the devil's choice at the end.
The death of a city - a bit rushed, and relied a little too heavily on the previous stories, but still, it worked.
More...