The Dragon Token is the second book of Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Star trilogy. It is actually book five of this series, as there is another trilogy which immediately precedes this one, the Dragon Prince trilogy.

Note: If you have not read Stronghold, then this review will contain spoilers, as I discuss events that happen at the end of the book.


How We Got Here

At the end of Stronghold, the invaders, the Vellant’im are attacking the castle, Stronghold. The High Prince Rohan is found dead in the castle, having suffered from a heart attack. His wife, Sioned, stricken with grief, sets Fire to his body (through the use of her Sunrunner gifts), and allows that fire to spread to the rest of the castle. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Stronghold are escaping the castle through tunnels which had been dug under it at the time of its construction.


The Beginning

The Dragon Token begins exactly where Stronghold left off – with the people of Stronghold escaping through the tunnels. For the next few chapters, Rawn goes through letting all of her characters know of Rohan’s death, and with it, Pol’s ascension to High Prince. Everybody mourns for the loss of their friend and prince, and as a reader, I wondered how good this book and the next one could possibly be without Rohan. Sioned seems to be in a state of shock, but we soon find out that her attitude is because she has been keeping the fire at Stronghold burning ever since Rohan’s death. Her old friend, Meath manages to bring her out of it by distracting her (he cuts her arm). The fires at Stronghold stop burning, and Sioned is forced to face her grief. She spends the rest of the book drunk out of her mind, and she plays hardly no role at all. Maybe this is why I didn’t like the book; the only reason I liked the previous books were because of Rohan and Sioned, and now their roles are basically complete, and we are left with the annoying, spoiled brat Pol.


A Quick Note On Sunrunning, For The Uninitiated

So what is this “Sunrunning” I am talking about? It is an inherited characteristic, and is considered a “gift” (though not all see it that way). Becoming a Sunrunner requires training, and allows the Sunrunner to travel on the light. They can watch over other people far away, assuming they are in the light of course. A Sunrunner needs light in order to go Sunrunning. If the light cuts out (e.g., the sun sets) while a person is Sunrunning, that person will become “shadow lost”, where the person’s body does not die, but their mind never returns to their body properly (or something like that).

Sunrunners can do all kinds of cool stuff, and calling Fire is one of them. They can produce a flame, either a cold flame, which is just light that takes the shape of fire, or they can call real fire, which is what Sioned does in the case of burning down Stronghold.


The Middle

Basically everything that happens after that for the next 400 pages or so is nothing but dialogue and politics, with the occasional brief battle. Boring, boring, and more boring. About halfway through I was wondering why I was having such a hard time reading the book, when I realized that it was because there had been nothing but dialogue for a couple of hundred pages. If a battle happened, we don’t hear about it until after it happens, and it is just someone saying “Oh, by the way, there was a battle at such and such a castle and so-and-so got killed”.

And the deaths; sometimes it seems that Rawn creates characters simply to kill them. People die, she expects us to care, but we don’t. Every once in a while she will throw in the death of someone who is really close to someone else; a husband, a daughter, a brother, just to make it sad. There are so many deaths that at the beginning of the following book, Skybowl, there is actually a list of characters who died in Stronghold and The Dragon Token, as well as a list of the characters who actually managed to survive. The only death that I actually cared about was Rohan’s, and that’s because he had been a major character for four books straight.

Rawn also manages to introduce a few more characters in this book; in Stronghold, the character index is five pages long, in The Dragon Token, it is seven pages. Yay! More people to kill!


The End

Ok, so it’s not all that bad. In the style of her previous trilogy, she ends off a somewhat uneventful book with a few interesting events so that you want to go on to read the next book. A few important people are captured by the Vellant’im, for what reason, we are not quite sure, but most likely to use them against Pol, the High Prince, during war negotiations. There is also a “hinting” towards an illness that everybody is getting, possibly similar to the plague from Dragon Prince.

Potential Minor Spoiler

There is also a plot twist thrown in that seems to have no place, it comes out of nowhere. One of the major characters cheats on his wife by sleeping with the woman who he should have married in the first place. There was no indication of this happening before it happened, all of a sudden he was just desperately in love with her and had to have her, while his wife was off getting herself captured by the Vellant’im.

Even though it will be interesting to see how all of this plays out in Skybowl, I still don’t understand why it happened. It seems to be for no other reason than to just liven up the books a bit.

I suppose by this point you’re wondering why I continue reading this series at all. Well, there’s something about it; when it’s good, it’s really good, and I am a bit attached to some of the characters. Also, I have read five books already and I just have one more to go in order to finish. I really want to find out what happens next. And I have this thing, where I can’t stand to leave things unfinished…

I will review Skybowl as soon as I finish it.


Other Details About This Book

Author: Melanie Rawn
Published by: DAW
Cover art by: Michael Whelan
ISBN: 0-88677-542-6
Pages: 654 (including character index)

Thanks for reading!





Recommended: No