a bit hard to get into at first, and often feels like it only appears to appeal to a very specific audience, maybe that's because its published by "wizards" - might be better the second time

I received an ARC of J.M. McDermott's Last Dragon through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program. Unfortunately this book confirmed that I should stop requesting things from that program without knowing more about them. "Hey, a fantasy novel, why not?" is insufficient reason to get a book, especially since flipping through it in the store would have made it clear that this was not a book for me.

So this is not really a review, because I only made it through the first chapter. The dealbreaker was that all the dialogue is in italics, which as a practical matter I found too much work to read. If the book had grabbed me right away, I might have been able to push through regardless, but it didn't. The prose and narration are deliberately fractured, as the opening paragraph indicates:

My fingers are like spiders drifting over memories in my webbed brain. The husks of the dead gaze up at me, and my teeth sink in and I speak their ghosts. But it's all mixed up in my head. I can't separate lines from lines, or people from people. Everything is in this web, Esumi. Even you. Even me. Slowly the meat falls from the bones until only sunken cheeks and empty space between the filaments remind me that a person was there, in my head. The ghosts all fade the same way. They fade together. Your face fades into the face of my husband and the dying screams of my daughter. Esumi, your face is Seth's face, and the face of the golem.

And then the narrator is remembering being a young woman in a strange city, and an unpleasant story her uncle told her, and for some reason even though she is very pale-skinned and from the far north, her teacher was called sensei, and I just couldn't get any traction.

I just couldn't get through this book. It has promise, but the alternating viewpoints were disconcerting, and it seemed like things just didn't make sense. I read fantasy, so I'm used to reading something I don't understand and trusting that the author will make it clear in the end, but too much of that, and the book got shelved. ( )

This was hard to read for me because the story is very disjointed. I picked this book up a year before but stopped after reading about half. It was hard to follow, because some chapters are without any kind of description and only about five to ten lines of conversation. I need to constantly catch up with the flashbacks and the settings. Some might like it, but this is not a style I like. I picked this up again yesterday and finally finished reading. The ending i think is disappointing, i felt like it is still missing some part, one side character Adel, i haven't figure out her motive fully yet. But this book is still worth reading, is a new style and very interesting and quite challenging. when i pieced the story together, is a good fantasy ( )

It's interesting to read the other reviews on the site - apparently most fantasy fans really like straightforward narrative and strongly dislike anything else. Therefore, they disliked and gave up on this novel, which was told in flashback through "letters." This isn't really all that strange or experimental a narrative style - it goes way back to antiquity. However, it does require the reader to do some filling-in-of-the-blanks.

I agree with several reviewers that the author could have worked out a more consistent naming convention for his various nationalities, but I didn't really notice this while reading (probably because fantasy is not one of my most frequently read genres - I notice genre-specific weaknesses a lot more readily in mysteries, as I've read so many).

Things I liked: I liked the fact that it was a bit hard to follow. It held my interest. I also liked the fact that it was a strictly first person limited narrative (again, requiring the reader to do some work). Usually I get annoyed by the omniscient tone that fantasy novels have. Finally, I thought the characters were pretty interesting, particularly the gypsy with the ants.

In sum, I thought this was an ambitious first novel - I'll be watching for more by this author - and unusually thought-provoking for a fantasy. ( )