A review by elenajohansen
Dragon Slippers by Jessica Day George
3.0
I've come out at the end of this story with strongly mixed feelings--what was good about it was very good, downright charming, while what was bad was pretty awful. And most of it comes in matched sets, right across the board.
What do I mean by that? Let's start with our cast of characters. The protagonist and her circle are both morally good and well-characterized. The villains, major or minor, are all stereotypically evil and weakly characterized, with little or no depth to the motivations for their actions. It's great that Creel is skilled at a craft, and ambitious, and kind when she can be but protective of her own needs when that's more important. I love that I have a good sense of her personality and how she would react to any given situation. But her counterpart Amalia? The shallowest of spoiled princesses, with no characterization beyond that, and the general motivation of "this country is our enemy so of course its princess turned out to be working against us." I'm sorry, girls her age with her upbringing and personality (what little there is of it) strike me as more likely to rebel against her parents and refuse to do anything useful, rather than help orchestrate the takeover of a hostile country using magic and dragons.
Now consider the pacing. The opening and middle of the story are a sort of genteel, plodding fairy tale where everyone takes their time having conversations, and Creel gets to describe her craft at length, and sure things are happening but no one is in any great hurry. Then the war starts and suddenly we readers are plunged into a fast(er)-paced narrative of danger and death and intrigue. I'm sorry, what happened to the almost Gaiman-esque layer of polish and charm to everything? (Not that bad things don't happen in Gaiman novels, they do, but they happen with a certain style to them.) The tonal whiplash I felt between Creel conversing calmly with her dragon friends, and then nearly everyone in the palace dying in a mind-controlled-dragon attack, cannot be overstated. It felt like I was reading an entirely different book that happened to have the same character names.
Let's talk disability rep, too. I'm not thrilled that our minor antagonist, Larkin, is a bitter young woman with a limp who hates being relegated to the back of the dress shop because of her appearance and disability, who eventually commits a bit of light treason to her country. Like, do I understand her feelings about the unfairness of how she's been treated? Absolutely! Do I think I'm actually supposed to believe as a reader that she's angry enough about it to want to turn her entire country over to the enemy, though? Not really. And if she's only supposed to have done the traitorous thing she did out of a certain level of understandable spite, then shouldn't she be remorseful in the end when she realizes the part she played in a situation that presumably went farther than she ever knew or intended?
And there's an obvious attempt to balance that "bad" rep by having Prince Luka's guard Tobin be mute, but still be awesome. And I'll agree he pretty much is, that's not the problem. The problem is that Creel is apparently so sheltered that she literally doesn't know sign language is a thing--though to be fair to her, it only gets brought up directly very late in the story, so it's not like I knew sign language was a thing in this fantasy world--and she only notices at the very end that Tobin has been communicating with others through gestures, in addition to the much more obvious body language that even speaking people use, like nodding or shaking one's head, etc. Yes, Creel is definitely a bit of a country bumpkin, but how does characterizing her as ignorant about disabilities help the narrative, or the reader? If Tobin is the "good" disabled rep to even out Larkin's "bad" rep, then why aren't his issues handled with more sensitivity?
Finally, I love Luka as the down-to-earth and kindly prince, and I get how he could be fascinated by someone like Creel, but the romance between them is mostly a tale I'm spinning in my own head based on a combination of hope (because I am that romantic) and pretty subtle clues I don't actually know if I would have picked up if I were the age group this is targeted towards. At the end, when my maybe-this-is-where-we're-going hopes were confirmed, I still wasn't sure it wasn't going to be just that Luka and Creel had forged a reasonably strong friendship across their social and class boundaries, but no, it was a romance, though that romance seemed as surprising to Creel as to anybody else, which I believe partially makes my point for me.
I see there's more to the series, but looking over the blurb, I'm just not invested enough.
What do I mean by that? Let's start with our cast of characters. The protagonist and her circle are both morally good and well-characterized. The villains, major or minor, are all stereotypically evil and weakly characterized, with little or no depth to the motivations for their actions. It's great that Creel is skilled at a craft, and ambitious, and kind when she can be but protective of her own needs when that's more important. I love that I have a good sense of her personality and how she would react to any given situation. But her counterpart Amalia? The shallowest of spoiled princesses, with no characterization beyond that, and the general motivation of "this country is our enemy so of course its princess turned out to be working against us." I'm sorry, girls her age with her upbringing and personality (what little there is of it) strike me as more likely to rebel against her parents and refuse to do anything useful, rather than help orchestrate the takeover of a hostile country using magic and dragons.
Now consider the pacing. The opening and middle of the story are a sort of genteel, plodding fairy tale where everyone takes their time having conversations, and Creel gets to describe her craft at length, and sure things are happening but no one is in any great hurry. Then the war starts and suddenly we readers are plunged into a fast(er)-paced narrative of danger and death and intrigue. I'm sorry, what happened to the almost Gaiman-esque layer of polish and charm to everything? (Not that bad things don't happen in Gaiman novels, they do, but they happen with a certain style to them.) The tonal whiplash I felt between Creel conversing calmly with her dragon friends, and then nearly everyone in the palace dying in a mind-controlled-dragon attack, cannot be overstated. It felt like I was reading an entirely different book that happened to have the same character names.
Let's talk disability rep, too. I'm not thrilled that our minor antagonist, Larkin, is a bitter young woman with a limp who hates being relegated to the back of the dress shop because of her appearance and disability, who eventually commits a bit of light treason to her country. Like, do I understand her feelings about the unfairness of how she's been treated? Absolutely! Do I think I'm actually supposed to believe as a reader that she's angry enough about it to want to turn her entire country over to the enemy, though? Not really. And if she's only supposed to have done the traitorous thing she did out of a certain level of understandable spite, then shouldn't she be remorseful in the end when she realizes the part she played in a situation that presumably went farther than she ever knew or intended?
And there's an obvious attempt to balance that "bad" rep by having Prince Luka's guard Tobin be mute, but still be awesome. And I'll agree he pretty much is, that's not the problem. The problem is that Creel is apparently so sheltered that she literally doesn't know sign language is a thing--though to be fair to her, it only gets brought up directly very late in the story, so it's not like I knew sign language was a thing in this fantasy world--and she only notices at the very end that Tobin has been communicating with others through gestures, in addition to the much more obvious body language that even speaking people use, like nodding or shaking one's head, etc. Yes, Creel is definitely a bit of a country bumpkin, but how does characterizing her as ignorant about disabilities help the narrative, or the reader? If Tobin is the "good" disabled rep to even out Larkin's "bad" rep, then why aren't his issues handled with more sensitivity?
Finally, I love Luka as the down-to-earth and kindly prince, and I get how he could be fascinated by someone like Creel, but the romance between them is mostly a tale I'm spinning in my own head based on a combination of hope (because I am that romantic) and pretty subtle clues I don't actually know if I would have picked up if I were the age group this is targeted towards. At the end, when my maybe-this-is-where-we're-going hopes were confirmed, I still wasn't sure it wasn't going to be just that Luka and Creel had forged a reasonably strong friendship across their social and class boundaries, but no, it was a romance, though that romance seemed as surprising to Creel as to anybody else, which I believe partially makes my point for me.
I see there's more to the series, but looking over the blurb, I'm just not invested enough.