📕 [Review] To Shape A Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose
Last year when I went to Barnes & Nobel, I picked up two dragon books: Black Leviathan and To Shape A Dragon's Breath. When I grabbed these, I was so excited for Black Leviathan, but admittedly not very for this one. In the end, it was the cover that convinced me to get this one, and my want to buy more than one book that day. But I'm always willing to give things another chance, and I was hoping I'd come to love this one.
Quick Review
| Category | Notes/Rating |
|---|---|
| Characters | Yeesh. |
| Writing Style | Needlessly in first-person with no seeming reason for it, but is functionally third-person. |
| Editing | No complaints. |
| Story | Didn't get far enough to even see a story. Still not really sure what the dragon rider school is even for. Do they become soldiers? Or just civilians with powerful pets? |
| Overall | ⭐️/5 DNF at 21% |
As much as I love books about dragons, I really haven't enjoyed dragon-rider books. I went into this expecting it wouldn't quite be for me, but really hoping I would enjoy it regardless. So that does mean I'm biased against the book, technically. But... the rest of the book wasn't really there to bring it up for me. In the end, this ended up being a reminder to avoid dragon-rider books.
So, yeah. I didn't finish this one.
Summary
Anequs is an indigenous girl who lives on her peoples' island home off the coast of... honestly I'm not sure. There is a world map at the beginning of the book, which is basically a map of the real world, but everything's renamed in a rather simplified way. But I couldn't actually locate her home, nor where she travels to. (This might be a skill issue on my part.)
But anyway. She's this indigenous girl in a world shaped not unlike our own. Her people have long-since lived under the rule of their colonizers, the Anglish. In this world, there are dragons. The Anglish have their opinions of dragons, and Anequs' people have their own, and the native-styled backstory of people first bonding with dragons is a nice touch. But Anequs' people haven't had a dragon of their own on the island since they were colonized, hundreds of years ago. But, by chance, luck, or fate, one day Anequs comes face to face with a dragon. This dragon, a mother, leaves behind a solitary dragon egg, which Anequs brings back to her village. In Anne McCaffrey fashion, the egg hatches and the hatchling bonds with Anequs, choosing her out of everyone in her village.
But there's a problem. The Anglish are a very burecrastic people, and dragons must be registered. The humans that bond to a dragon must go to special dragon-riding schools in Anglish territory. And if the human and dragon fail to meet the criteria set by the school, the dragon will be considered "feral" or untrainable and be put to death. This puts Anequs in an awful predicament: she'd never planned to ever leave her village, but now must walk amongst her colonizers, who judge her and stereotype her; and not just that, she has to prove herself worthy in their eyes in order to keep the blessed dragon, the first seen in generations, alive.
My Thoughts
Like I said, this is a reminder that I need to stop picking up dragon-rider books, as they just want to treat dragons as magical pets instead of fantastic monsters. But the fact that the main character complains that the Anglish treat dragons like dogs/beasts when the first-person narration constantly compares their behavior to cats, without giving the dragons any sense of intelligence, is dumb. Maybe there's some intelligence that comes up later, when the dragon is older; but none of the other experienced dragonriders mention it 111 pages in, so I doubt it. Your protagonist narrates them as beasts but then gets mad when the Anglish compare them to beasts. Okay.
Anequs is unlikable and hypocritical; she complains constantly about the colonizer aspect of the society, but the only time she even tries to make friends with someone is when that person - an indentured maid - is lower ranked than her. She harasses the girl who says no multiple times, who desperately doesn't want to get in trouble for mingling with someone higher classed, into being friends with her. But everyone else who's tried to be friends so far, the Anglish kids she's met, they're all nasty and don't understand her and must look down on her, and that makes them terrible and so she has to argue with them instead of bridging the gap.
There's a whole conversation where a man argues with her and calls her "emotional" while he's described as getting heated. During this scene, we get dialog from Anequs, but her narration never mentions her emotional state at all - only his. I assume the author expects us to take that he's emotional one while she's calm and collected, but you COULD actually read them both getting heated as the author fails to clarify, as the dialogue is ambiguous enough to go either way. The story is in first person; why not a line like "he was making me mad but I kept my composure"? Or "he's trying to make me mad, but it's not going to work"?
Why the first-person perspective if you're doing nothing with it? I'm not normally anti-first person, but it really brought to my attention how much of her inner thoughts I just didn't get. So now I get to guess and I can assume she's just not admitting to the reader that she was mad. And if she can hide that as the narrator, what else is unreliable? It doesn't seem like she's supposed to be telling an unreliable-narrator story, after all.
The dragons are boring side-pieces and everyone else is bigoted and wrong at all times. Unless the protag out-classes them, then it's okay for her to bully them into friendship.
Overall, this could have been better if the protag was willing to come to the table more, rather than just assert she knows more about dragons when she's only had one for two weeks, and when she comes from an island where they haven't had dragons at all in recent memory. It's fine to have opinions - obviously one would be upset to just learn the Anglish potentially treat dragons poorly - but she literally pushes away a potential friend over her assumptions. And they are assumptions. Maybe the author would have done better to take a step back from the story and make it a bit more fantastic; the direct analogs to the real world may have bogged down the potential for a powerful message. But instead, it seems the author may have just let their own point of view on real world events hinder the story they wanted to tell.
Nothing to hook my interest at 111 pages in. I took a peek at the reviews on Goodreads and according to them, it stays much the same way throughout the book. Shouldn't have let the cover sway me, in the future I'll check out a book like this rather than buy it.