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A review by aix83
A Dragon of a Different Color by Rachel Aaron
3.0
Apart from the main characters and the way the book is written I liked everything. Isn't this a weird thing to say.
2.5* rounded up.
I so wanted to like this book, which is why I keep pedalling through the series, but it has so many grating problems.
The good parts:
- The worldbuilding is really nice.
- The magic system is great, complicated but well thought out while not being over the top.
- I liked the Chelsie/Xian subplot, which is the main plot of this book from my standpoint.
- Xian, the Qilin, a luck dragon, is the best gimmick I've read in years. There's oodles of awesomeness in that idea alone to save the book.
- Amelia.
- Bob.
- Ian and Svena.
- Emily Jackson and her magical golem body made out of miles of spellwork cast in thin stripes of metal. Really cool way to implement a cyborg/Robocop within a magic system.
- Even Myron is a cool antagonist. He's got that wicked labyrinth magic and major character development.
The bad parts:
- Julius finally realized the F clutch if Chelsie's and only because he was told. Really dude, just now? I already had a theory since the last book that he's stupid but this is the last piece of evidence.
- Now Marci is stupid too. While her slightly mercenary, grey nature made a lot more sense than Julius' incorruptible not-of-this-world pure pureness, now she's become silly too. When she argues with Myron in the Merlin tower in the Sea of Magic she doesn't have any other arguments than her selfish desires and what feels good to her. She's judging what the last Merlin did before having the background, before understanding his actions, and then she clings to magic because she likes using it and because she likes power. That's it! Sure, later on they discover that having magic means that the afterlife exists for all humankind, but that's not what she had in mind as her argument, is it. She just had whiny self-entitled this-feels-good-to-my-tummy I-am-such-an-optimist pseudo-arguments. Who cares if a few people - or a few million- die, there's always more where they came from.
- Exposition and major info-dumps disguised as dialogue. Instead of showing us the world, the book is doing minimalistic descriptions and then it has people talking each other to death. Talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking, the whole book is talking. It could have shown us how things in the magic world move, how they interact, what happens in reaction to various things but no. It's safer that we're told.
This book is an improvement compared to the one before, which was even more boringly written and where Julius was even more hateably stupid (the difference between forgiving the villain and putting her in charge where she can continue to manipulate and hurt others).
2.5* rounded up.
I so wanted to like this book, which is why I keep pedalling through the series, but it has so many grating problems.
The good parts:
- The worldbuilding is really nice.
- The magic system is great, complicated but well thought out while not being over the top.
- I liked the Chelsie/Xian subplot, which is the main plot of this book from my standpoint.
- Xian, the Qilin, a luck dragon, is the best gimmick I've read in years. There's oodles of awesomeness in that idea alone to save the book.
- Amelia.
- Bob.
- Ian and Svena.
- Emily Jackson and her magical golem body made out of miles of spellwork cast in thin stripes of metal. Really cool way to implement a cyborg/Robocop within a magic system.
- Even Myron is a cool antagonist. He's got that wicked labyrinth magic and major character development.
The bad parts:
- Julius finally realized the F clutch if Chelsie's and only because he was told. Really dude, just now? I already had a theory since the last book that he's stupid but this is the last piece of evidence.
- Now Marci is stupid too. While her slightly mercenary, grey nature made a lot more sense than Julius' incorruptible not-of-this-world pure pureness, now she's become silly too. When she argues with Myron in the Merlin tower in the Sea of Magic she doesn't have any other arguments than her selfish desires and what feels good to her. She's judging what the last Merlin did before having the background, before understanding his actions, and then she clings to magic because she likes using it and because she likes power. That's it! Sure, later on they discover that having magic means that the afterlife exists for all humankind, but that's not what she had in mind as her argument, is it. She just had whiny self-entitled this-feels-good-to-my-tummy I-am-such-an-optimist pseudo-arguments. Who cares if a few people - or a few million- die, there's always more where they came from.
- Exposition and major info-dumps disguised as dialogue. Instead of showing us the world, the book is doing minimalistic descriptions and then it has people talking each other to death. Talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking talking, the whole book is talking. It could have shown us how things in the magic world move, how they interact, what happens in reaction to various things but no. It's safer that we're told.
This book is an improvement compared to the one before, which was even more boringly written and where Julius was even more hateably stupid (the difference between forgiving the villain and putting her in charge where she can continue to manipulate and hurt others).