Dragons Wild (edition 2008)

Fun so far. Fast moving, not hard to get into. I'm a few chapters in and not as much humor as the early Myth books yet, but some good ideas. RIP RLA

Very much not Asprin's best work. I actually double-checked to see if this actually was Robert Asprin's book, and I hadn't purchased something written by somebody else by accident.
Griffen has essentially everything going for him, and the main difficulty he encounters is just not that "difficult." He never had to really work hard at anything, and was sort of bland.
Half way through, the book starts switching viewpoint characters which was really annoying. It's fine to have multiple "main" characters, but that should be clear from the beginning, not just suddenly switching to the other character in the middle of the book.
Dialogue was iffy at best. There was never any real tension in the book, and no reason why the reader should root for the main character except for the simple fact that he IS the main character.
It was a reasonably entertaining read, in the same way that airport novels picked up in desperation are entertaining. But that was about it. ( )

I actually found this book to be, quite frankly, racist in the pure sense of the word. An entitled kid who slouches through college finds out he is actually a dragon. Suddenly he's the superior race and the rest of the book is concerned with others of a lesser race (half breeds, "quadroons," "octoons") constantly catering to him and providing him with a house, money, a business to run however he feels like running it, a hot chick, heck, TWO hot chicks to bed (at the same time!), and the whole world on a platter. This is all given to him because he was born of a "pure" race of dragons. It's like reading the autobiography of George W. Bush. ( )

To be frank, I was disappointed. I love Asprin's Myth series and I think it's really clever, so I was very excited to see that he had a series about dragons. The plot was engaging and new: Griffen, a recent college graduate who slid through school, goes in to an interview hoping to land a cushy job with his uncle only to find out that he is descended from a line of almost purebred dragons and his secondary characteristics will be kicking in soon. Since he will be powerful, many other dragons out there either want to recruit him or kill him, which causes him to flee to an illicit gambling ring (also run by dragons) in New Orleans.

And that's about where his being a dragon stops being important to the plot. For all that Asprin did with it, "dragon" could might as well have been a metaphor for a person who is in power. This, coupled with awkward dialogue (actual use of characters calling each other Little Sister and Big Brother regularly), some preachy conversations that have nothing to with the rest of the book, some very bad grammar that you think someone would have caught in the editing process, and not enough information/details to the characters to make you actually care about them made for a not-so-enjoyable read on my part. It goes very quickly, that's for sure, but if you're looking for higher quality, I'd say go somewhere else. ( )