Hello, everyone! The
other day, I interviewed Petra, one of the heroines of
Lady Dragon, Tela Du. Today, I'm back on the blog tour- not with another interview, but with a review of the book.
A year and a month ago, Kendra E. Ardnek released
Water Princess, Fire Prince
, the first book in the
Rizkaland Legends. I enjoyed it; it
wasn't amazing, but it was creative and a fun read and had a cute main
couple and a good theme. I expected roughly the same from
Lady Dragon, Tela Du- but when I opened the book, what I found blew me away. Why? I'm glad you asked.
(But, first, a bit of background to this review: I beta-read
Lady Dragon, Tela Du
before Ir ead it for this review, which basically means that I got to
send the author hopefully-helpful comments, which were really more like
half helpful and half fangirling. The main effects of that, as far as
this review goes, are (A)I've read it twice and therefore have had more
times to organize my thoughts on it, and (B)I have a more comprehensive
stock of comments to look back on regarding my reactions to certain
things. Anyway. On with the review.)
The Awesome:
-
The Characters:
Are generally awesome, with a few exceptions (which I'll get to later). A quick rundown of my favorites:
--
Petra is the main character and the titular
Tela Du.
She's also rather snarky, quite practical, and not particularly pleased
at being tossed into a fantasy world and a destiny. Thankfully, she
gets over it quickly and proceeds to be awesome. She's a very human
character- she makes bad decisions at times, gets annoyed at people, and
harbors a fair bit of resentment over certain events. But her
determination and desire to do her best even with a destiny she didn't
want make up for it (as does the aforementioned snark). And she loves
tea and BBC television and long skirts and chocolate and apparently has a
bit of a British accent, so, yeah. What's not to like?
--
Reuben
is Petra’s best friend and also love interest . . . though I feel like
it’s a little bit unfair to call him a love interest, because he’s way
more than that. He balances Petra out while still being totally his own
character: steady, dependable, and an immense lover of fantasy-fiction.
I’m pretty certain that he and I would get along famously if only he was
real- we could chat about The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of
Narnia and shove other favorite books at each other to our hearts’
content. I was a tiny bit disappointed that Kendra didn’t make more use
of the opportunities for humor with him (having a fantasy-lover in a
fantasy world is practically begging for some kind of jokes about
genre-savvyness or “in stories” or predicting what’s going to happen
based on common narrative tropes), but I still love him.
--
Amber
is the titular Lady Dragon and the center of an amazing work of
character and narrative development on Kendra’s part. Some of you may
remember a certain Goodreads status update of mine from
Water Princess, Fire Prince
in which I essentially expressed my desire to be Petra so I could kill
Amber in a fairly painful manner. I still held that opinion at the start
of
Lady Dragon, Tela Du, though I enjoyed getting to see some of
the story from her perspective . . . but then, as I learned more about
her, my hatred began to weaken, and by Part 4 or somewhere thereabouts, I
was hoping that Petra would find some loophole by which she could
avoid
killing Amber. But, yeah. Amber’s a sympathetic villain, and a tragic
one, and a very well-written character on the whole. (Also, she enjoys
writing, so who can argue with that?)
--
Granite is Amber’s
husband. He tends to make me sad- he truly loves Amber, and she loves
him back, but her heart has been stolen by a particular aspect of her
magic, and so he’s left in her shadow. He’s not evil; he’s truly a good
character. But he’s bound to Amber and it’s just so
sad. And he
does his best to try to temper Amber’s wrath and turn her from her ways,
but there’s so little he can do and yeah. I love him muchly.
--
Laura
is the Doorkeeper. Occasionally there’s two of her. She’s mysterious in
a very friendly sort of way and tends to drop a lot of hints about the
future and plot twists and everything else, and because of her role,
sometimes she’s the main one moving the plot along. She also tends to do
unexpected things and not really give a great deal of explanation for
them until later. She’s also the one responsible for getting people from
Earth to Rizkaland and back again, so, yeah. Very fun character.
--
Other characters: I liked Summer and Tyler, though I didn’t connect with them as much as I did others. Ritis was pretty cool as well.
-
The couples
are generally adorable, particularly Reutra (Reuben and Petra) and
Amber and Granite (who currently don’t have a ship name, though they
should). I fangirled over them quite a bit in my beta comments . . . so
much so that Kendra, at one point, literally told me to stop encouraging
her characters to kiss. (Sorry, Kendra. Not really, though. They’re
just so sweet together!) So, yeah. Kendra absolutely Does Not Do love
triangles, which means that any difficulties in the relationship come
from the characters being actual people and not from ridiculous drama
and it’s a very nice change of pace from the fantasy standard.
-
Family emphasis.
Petra and Reuben both come from mid-sized families (each has 3 siblings)
and they care very much indeed for their siblings . . . even the ones
that only they remember. Their parents also play a somewhat larger role
than is common in fantasy books- not a huge role, no, but they know
what's going on and give advice when they can. So that's awesome. And I
love Ashna's relationship with her parents and her family-related
struggle at one point in the book.
-
Plot twists were
masterfully executed. There's one particular twist regarding Amber . . .
I might've had a vague idea of "Hey, maybe this" at the very beginning
of the novel, but quickly dismissed it . . . AND THEN IT HAPPENED. And
it caught me totally off-guard. And as a general rule, I've read enough
fantasy to see most plot twists coming- if not a mile away, then still
before they happen. There's a second pretty big twist as well after that
first one, and I did start getting a suspicion towards that one before
it was revealed, but I wasn't
sure. But both twists are really
well set up, particularly on a second read-through. As I think I
mentioned in one of my status updates, I kept finding hints (some rather
obvious in hindsight) and I got very excited.
-No weaponry prodigies
are present in this book. I know this is kind of a weird thing to put
in the "awesome" category . . . but, honestly? I get tired after a while
of reading about one character after another who's almost
supernaturally skilled with their weapon of choice, regardless of how
much actual training he or she has had with it. In LDTD, very few
characters actually end up fighting period, and the only super-amazing
ones are Amber and Granite . . . but they've lived roughly 6,000 years,
so, yeah, I think they would be by now.
The Non-Awesome:
-Some of the characters came out a little flat . . . and
by some I mostly mean Noraeto. I feel like the only reasons he really
existed were (A)as a love interest for one of the main characters, and
(B)as a son and grandson for two minor characters. So, yeah. He honestly
doesn't seem to do much, and on one hand, having him do more would've
taken the spotlight away from Petra and Amber and Reuben and Granite and
the excellent plot twists (which, let's face it, were what I was
actually reading the book for), but on the other hand, if you're going
to give a main character a love interest, at least make the love
interest decidedly his own character.
-Part one is kind of hard to get through. It's not as bad as part one of Water Princess, Fire Prince,
because there are Amber sections and those were awesome. But it also
wasn't amazing, mostly because- like in WPFP- I didn't connect very well
with (one of) the main viewpoint character(s). More on that in a
moment. Once you get through that first part, it's much more interesting
(again, like in WPFP), but yeah. Here's hoping that Kendra can break
the trend in book three.
-The writing can be a little rough in spots,
particularly with regards to conversations between characters. That
being said, this complaint might just be the beta-reader side talking. I
was looking for that sort of thing the first time I read it, and my
instinct was to look again when I got the reviewer copy. Either way,
it's not significant enough to be a real problem, but it can be a touch
distracting at times.
The I-Don't-Know-How-I-Feel-About-This:
-Ashna. On one hand, I didn't really connect with her
that well, particularly in the first section (as I mentioned before).
And I did come to like her a bit better later in the book. But she still
didn't quite click for me- which is sad, because I wanted to like her
more than I did. She's a sweet girl, and she's a nice change from the
current cliche of warlike, hot-tempered, ultra-skilled female main
characters in fiction (as I also mentioned previously). But, for some
reason, that click just didn't happen.
-Karyn. I hate
Karyn. I really do. I quite literally spent the majority of two
chapters yelling at her to shut up every time she said anything. (She
was being an idiot at the time, for the record.) But there's certain
other things about Karyn . . . things that would be spoilers . . . so I
can't completely hate her. And she actually is a well-written character,
particularly when you have all the information about her- I can
understand why she did what she did. But I still don't like her, and my
usual reaction to seeing her on-page is still "Shut up and go away."
Cautions:
On the whole, Lady Dragon, Tela Du is a pretty clean
read. There's next to no violence and no swearing. There is romance, as
previously mentioned, which is the only area of (very mild) caution. A
particular aspect of Petra and Reuben's abilities give certain scenes
very intimate overtones, though younger readers may not fully pick up on
them. Two of the couples are married, and do sleep together (we see
them go to bed and wake up; nothing in between). Couples kiss- mostly
the married ones, though there's one unwed kiss (which is both applauded
and reprimanded). So, there's nothing of real concern, and the two main
romances (Reutra and Amber/Granite) actually provide two very good
portrayals of romance and marriage- one how it ought to be, one how it
can be broken and then mended.
Overall, Lady Dragon, Tela Du is not only a worthy sequel to Water Princess, Fire Prince,
but it defies Second Book Syndrome in actually being far better than
the first book in the series. Well-drawn characters, astounding plot
twists, adorable romances, and poignant themes all combine to make this a
must-read for any lover of the portal fantasy genre.
-------------
About Lady Dragon, Tela Du:
Two girls with one face
Two girls with twisted fate
One in purple, one in red
One shall speak the other’s death
Who shall win their final war?
Lady Dragon or Tela Du?
Amber,
the Lady Dragon, has been promised a fifty-year reign over Rizkaland
and nothing can stop her from claiming it. But when you've lived six
thousand years, fifty is such a pitiful number. Only one person can keep
her from making this reign permanent - the Tela Du, a girl who shall
share Amber's face.
The last thing Petra wants is a magical world
interrupting her plans for a normal life, let alone an ultimate battle
against the Lady Dragon with only one prophesied survivor. She has her
childhood best friend, Reuben, at her side, but she's not sure if he's
more of a help or a hindrance right now. Though she'd much prefer to
just return home and forget about this whole crazy affair, things change
when she discovers that the world has surprising connections to her own
family - including her sister who disappeared without a trace two years
before. Still, Rizkaland can't possibly expect her to risk her very
life, can it?
Find It On:
About the Author:
Kendra
E. Ardnek is a homeschool graduate who picked up a pen at an early age
and never put it down. The eldest of four, she makes her home in the
Piney Woods of East Texas with her parents, younger siblings, giant herd
of giraffes, and honor guard of nutcrackers.
Find Kendra Online At:
Haven't read Water Princess, Fire Princess yet?
No problem! Today's the last day to get it
free on Kindle. I definitely recommend picking up a copy. It's a fun read- and, hey, who says no to free books?
And don't forget to check out today's other tour stops:
Interviews:
Reviews:
Other:
Thanks for stopping by!
-
Sarah (Leilani Sunblade)
