I’m here to report that I was pleasantly surprised about Dragon Keeper.The novel is situated in an acid-filled swampland called The Rain Wilds, where dragons have all but died out and people have moved to the rain forest canopy to survive. Basically, I expected My Friend Flicka with scales and wings. I’ve read others, by Mercedes Lackey and others: a big scary dragons meets a girl who falls in love with the creature. I assumed it would be, like most novels with the word “Dragon” in the title, a cheaper knock-off of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight series. When I picked up Dragon Keeper, a novel by Robin Hobb, it was specifically to have a nice, mindless read during my several hours of sitting in airports. If just baffles my mind that Hobb could write such amazing, beloved stories, and then turn around and write this disaster. I sincerely hope this story will improve as it goes along. The equivalent of this in those stories would be if Hobb had written in an extra five characters facing the troubles of being a bastard in a conservative society, and instead of making their experiences unique, she merely repeated the storyline of the first character with slight differences, over and over again, until their bastardhood overshadowed everything else about them and their experiences. The Farseer & Tawny Man series are about a royal bastard (the born out of wedlock kind, not the jerk kind). Free your women, give them more chance to LIVE! In the Farseer & Tawny Man series- the women had their troubles, most even faced sexism and oppression, but it was only one facet of their experiences, which made for well-rounded, interesting characters. Use some imagination for god's sake! Show some more subtle forms of oppression. They constantly use rape, abuse, or threat of them, as a plotline. And the series are completely uncreative in their oppression. But it should also be entertaining, and all the oppression just makes me depressed. Yes, fantasy should explore social issues. But Hobb could show the struggles of oppressed women, and even show a few of their perspectives, without repeating the same story over and over again. And I am a strong feminist, so normally I wouldn't make that kind of argument. In this, and the Liveship series, no women seem to be free from oppression of some sort, which makes for a boring story and stunts their characters. I cannot believe an editor was so lax as to approve this! I can ignore bad writing for the sake of a good story, but repetitive, uncreative writing just jars me from the story, and bores and frustrates me.Īs for the female characters- why are they so downtrodden? I get that Hobb might want to talk about the struggles of women in a less-developed, slightly oppressive environment, but she has gone overboard. The speech between one character and the next is almost identical sometimes, and conversation tends to repeat another character's thoughts from a mere one page earlier. 211 pages in, and I cannot recall any ordinary conversations- they are all super long, almost formal, and seem to talk about the same town issues/ over and over again, with no distinct differences in the perspective from different characters. I think her Liveship series was somewhere in between the others and this book in quality. And her wide variety of characters, and in particular her representations of women, were excellent. I adored the Farseer & Tawny Man series from Hobb, and her writing style was perfectly fine in those. This is a good story, but the writing does it absolutely no justice. I'm only about a quarter through this book, but it is frustrating me so much that I have to vent my feelings. So, though I stand by my low rating and negative review of Dragon Keeper, I would recommend you push through it and read the rest of the series, because I adored the second book.***** The improvement from the first book is almost miraculous. *****I just wanted to say that I have finished the second book, Dragon Haven.
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