It took me four years to fins and read all of Melanie Rawn’s Dragon books and I wish I had stopped after the first one. She wrote two trilogies, Dragon Prince and Dragon Star before plunging into an entirely new set of characters in the Ambray novels.

The Dragon Prince was her first novel which she wrote while teaching high school geography. It was magical. The descriptions were enough to make one weep. The characters were alive with desires and agendas of their own. I searched feverishly for the second book.

The Star Scoll focused more on the son of the couple from Dragon Prince, but it was still very good. I liked the son. I felt betrayed by his cousin who was becoming a bad guy. The machinations were believable and interesting. The new threat of dark magic felt perfectly natural. And we’re talking to dragons now, yipee.

Sunrunner’s Fire was a little more confusing. We’re starting to have a cast of characters that is nothing if not unwieldy. And, because Rohan and Sioned are so well loved, other people are naming their children after them and those children are major characters. Having a Sioned, a Siona and a Sionell all in the same book is a little weird. Still, we have good villians and neat magic. Although, the book ends with a heavy "There’s more story to come" hook which irritated me. I don’t like being forced to read the next book and the next book and so on forever.

Stronghold introduced a here-to-fore unknown enemy strikingly similar to the Vikings. The land is in flames and our heroes do the only thing thinkable, they retreat. There’s some good family conflict here, but there’s still an incredible number of characters to keep track of.

The Dragon Token continues the endless war against the invaders and I can’t help thinking that if this had been the first novel this whole trilogy would have been contained in one book.

Skybowl is the last Dragon Star book. For some reason, I still love these people. I was scared when the book started with an authors note that told where and how different characters died and whether they were Sunrunners or Sorcerers. Should anything be so complicated? There is also a list of "Characters surviving as of the 57th day of Winter 737." It’s three pages long. But after five books, I need to know how everything ends.

After all that I still really like Melanie Rawn and I eagerly anticipated her new trilogy, hoping that with a new cast she could shake off the complication of the Dragon books. I got it for Christmas the year it came out and read it right away. Can’t find it now. Must have passed it off on somebody less discriminating. As I recall it had the trademark neat magic and the beautiful descriptions but under it all was this really annoying feminist claptrap. I consider myself a feminist and I really hate it when someone claming to be a feminst starts going on about how women are better than men. We’re not better, we’re different. The society in Ambray is matriarchal, but the villains are all just like men and the heroes are…just like men. And the men? They’re doing needle point to fill their days. Argh.

I also tried The Golden Key which Rawn wrote with Jennifer Roberson and Kate Elliot and it left me wondering if any of them actually knew anything about oil painting. All the magic was done through oil painting, but they didn’t seem to understand how the medium worked from the canvas stretching, mineral spirits stripping the oils from your skin level.

She started so well. In fact, when I was an emotional basket case in the closing days of my tenure at Northern Ohio Live, I reached for Dragon Prince because I knew reading it would make me happy. But this time I was smart, I stopped after the first book. It’s all down hill from there.




Recommended: Yes