Donita K. Paul

The primary weakness of The Dragonkeeper Chronicles is not that Mrs. Paul attempts to mix fantasy with Christian mythology in what seems to be a morality play designed to give the story a "correct" moral message. After all, this is a fairly common practice indulged in by even the grandfathers of modern fantasy such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien who infused a Christian message into their fantasy. And the roots run much deeper than that, one need only look at Spenser's Faerie Queene or show more Andre Norton's translation of Huon of the Horn to see the lengthy pedigree of the entanglement. The weakness of DragonFire and the remainder of The Dragonkeeper Chronicles is that when Mrs. Paul inserted a collection of pseudo-Christian messages into her books, she forgot to include much in the way of an interesting story as a vehicle to carry them.

The opening chapters of DragonFire illustrate this point fairly well. In DragonKnight, the previous book in the series, the knight Bardon declares his interest in the wizard Kale, who states quite quaintly that she desires to be properly courted. But in the opening pages of DragonFire one learns that not only has the story the reader is allowed to see skipped over showing the reader Bardon and Kale's courtship, they got married three years prior to the start of the book. A handful of pages into the story, we learn that Regidor and Gilda have also fallen in love and gotten married, and not only that, Kale has discovered a way to reverse Gilda's incorporeal affliction, once again, all reported to the reader as already accomplished facts. Instead of actually engaging the reader with the story of the characters and their relationships with one another, which might pull the reader into her fictional world and make one care about them and their struggles, Mrs. Paul clearly considers it more important to have her characters spout quotations concerning correct moral action from the "Tomes of Wulder".

This doesn't mean that the pseudo-Christian moral lessons are delivered particularly well either. Mrs. Paul seems to take it for granted that the reader will see the correctness of her characters' moral pronouncements as self-evident, and usually doesn't bother to effectively illustrate them in the story. In the early going in the book, our heroes run across an eccentric elderly emmerlindian who holds less than orthodox views concerning Wulder. Bardon reflects that this will hamper the effectiveness of the assistance this emmerlindian provides them, but of course, the confirmation of this is nowhere to be found in the book. Apparently, the reader is just supposed to take for granted that Bardon is correct, since he is, after all, correctly quoting from the "Tomes of Wulder" and the emmerlindian is not. This sort of sloppy storytelling runs through the entire book, as plot thread after plot thread is simply dropped without any kind of real resolution other than some character mouthing platitudes from the "Tomes of Wulder".

What makes DragonFire really disappointing is that in the middle third of the book it seems as if an actual story might break out - Kale and her father head off to try to find the dragons of Amara and rally them to Paladin's cause, and Bardon and the other characters all head off to try to halt the warring armies of Burner Stox, Crim Cropper, and the Pretender, all of whom have fallen to fighting one another for not particularly well explained reasons. The fact that the characters are actually doing something more or less proactive is tempered by the fact that they had to be told to head off and take action directly by Paladin, once again reinforcing the call to passivity that had been a theme of the prior books in the series. But true to form, the characters quickly abandon any kind of proactive action and let themselves be pulled along by events - Kale and her father abandon looking for dragons when they stumble across a pilfering ropma, and of course, getting side tracked from their goal leads Kale and her father directly to their goal, because everything is part of Wulder's plan and therefore you should just drift through life and not actually try to focus on any goal more distant than one's feet. Of course, this seems to cause the characters trouble, as Bardon, afflicted with the childhood illness of "the stakes" is captured just outside his main headquarters because he didn't think to post any guards to keep Crim Cropper's bisonbeck patrols more than a hundred feet from his camp.

But even this tiny bit of tension evaporates away. When Kale and her father finally confront Burner Stox, a horrible evil sorceress that has been built up as a dangerous villain since the first book in the series, she is killed by accident by a well-meaning but stupid dragon. Crim Cropper's death is more dramatic, but before he dies he clumsily allows Bardon to escape from imprisonment. In the end, even The Pretender turns out to be no threat at all. First, despite accepting a gift from The Pretender, Kale suffers no untoward effects, and the gift turns out to be entirely beneficial to her and Paladin's cause. So much for The Pretender being effective at deception or seduction. And then, when confronted by Paladin, it turns out that The Pretender is powerless because Wulder has decreed it so. The primary villain turning out to be no threat at all may be correct pseudo-Christian theology, but it makes for a pretty uninteresting story. Further, given that all of the events of the book are clearly stated to be according to Wulder's grand design, one has to wonder about the cruelty of a deity like Wulder who seems to have, as part of his plan, the wanton slaughter of hundreds, if not thousands of people at the hands of the various evil forces. Rather than convincing the reader of Wulder's supposed love for the people of Amara (and consequently, God's supposed love for the people of Earth), one finds oneself repulsed by such a callous and unthinking deity.

The questionable morality seems to be a theme through to book too. At one point, The Pretender performs some sort of mind-control over a collection of grawligs (or mountain ogres) to make them relentlessly hunt down kimens, drawn by the scent of the diminutive beings. In one of the few instances of planning by the heroes, Bardon builds timber stockades to entice and entrap the grawligs. Once the grawligs are trapped, apparently Bardon and his troops are squeamish about killing the enraged ogres. Squeamish, that is, until the kimens suggest shooting them with kimen arrows. These apparently won't actually harm the ogres, but will make them smell like a kimen, causing the other grawligs trapped in the stockade to attack and kill them. I'm not sure how one reconciles the idea that killing grawligs (as sentient beings) is wrong with the idea that goading them into a frenzy in which they kill each other is not wrong. And this is only one instance in which the weird twisted morality espoused by Mrs. Paul's heroes makes one scratch one's head, especially since the book is clearly trying to promote these ideas as something that the intended audience should take as a valuable life lesson and emulate.

With undeveloped characters and undeveloped interrelationships between characters (both of which are kind of amazing given that this is the fourth book in a series that features the same characters throughout), a plot that more or less just drifts from place to place, and ineffective nonthreatening villains, DragonFire is, like the rest of The Dragonkeeper Chronicles, a limp and uninteresting exercise in didactic instruction of dubious moral lessons. Though it makes a feeble stab at having an actual story, which raises it above the other books in the series in terms of quality, the fact that huge chunks of the story are told "off-camera" (including the climatic battle against The Pretender's own army) and those parts that are told are mostly just characters reciting the dubious morality of the pseudo-Christian "Tomes of Wulder", the book is simply a decidedly below average piece of young adult fantasy fiction.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less

In this fifth, and final book of the series, The Dragon Keeper Chronicles stumbles to a close with most of the characters standing around not doing much of anything while the action is resolved by a poorly set up deus ex machina. This book offers a new, and more or less random villain, and also includes more examples of Mrs. Paul's tendency to leave plot threads hanging, resolve much of the action of the story off-stage, and eschew storytelling in favor of didactic pseudo-Christian lessons. show more In short, DragonLight follows in the turgid and uninteresting footsteps of its predecessors to deliver a decidedly weak story and an uninspired reading experience.

The story picks up several years after where DragonFire left off with Amara having enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity after the successive defeats of Risto, Burner Stox, Crim Cropper, and The Pretender. This idyllic existence is shattered when Bardon discovers "The Followers" a monastic sect of Paladin worshippers who have upset the natural order by setting up a small settlement so they can live out an ascetic existence of wearing uniform clothing, eating bad food, and not speaking much. But their ideas are almost immediately dubbed heretical, and they are identified as a threat. It seems as though Mrs. Paul is using The Followers to make a comment upon religious sects whose theology she disapproves of - the doctrine espoused by The Followers seems to bear some similarities to the teachings of Scientologists, Mormons, Catholics, and maybe a couple of other religious groups - but it is difficult to identify exactly who is being metaphorically condemned. It is also difficult for the reader to figure out what specifically is heretical about the teachings of The Followers, since Mrs. Paul has done such a poor job of establishing the parameters of the pseudo-Christian Wulder worship that is at the heart of her books. Bardon, Dar, Kale, and the other main characters certainly tell the reader that The Followers are twisting Wulder's teachings, but the reader has almost no way of figuring it out on their own. And this simply highlights one of the primary recurring weaknesses of Mrs. paul's storytelling: instead of providing sufficient background information and then allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions, she waits until a crisis has arisen in the story and dictates to the reader what the correct solution is, oftentimes using "principles of Wulder" elucidated for the first time as the solution to the crisis.

Of course, no matter how dangerous this threat is, it cannot stand in the way of Bardon and Kale heading off to dance at a party and then trek to the uncharted northern reaches to help Regidor and Gilda find the lost meech colony. After all, Regidor and Gilda have only waited several years to make this journey, so it is clearly of pressing importance that it be done immediately despite the sudden appearance of a mysterious heretical sect. Somewhat justifying this sudden need to head to the wilderness in search of the secretive meech colony is the fact that Gilda is carrying an egg that she insists she can only present to what she imagines to be the glorious meech civilization. However, Bardon and Kale seem to take a fatalistic attitude that, having decided to help search for the lost meech colony, they cannot turn aside and deal with a different potential threat because Wulder apparently already assigned them the "find the meech colony" quest, and they can't do anything else until they complete that.

(As an aside, one meme that runs through all of the books in the series is this very self-conscious attitude that the characters have when they are undertaking a task that they are then "on a quest". This sort of thinking more or less fits with the didactic tone of the books, but it still makes the characters and situations seem oddly artificial. Apparently, once one is "on a quest' it seems that one is more or less obligated refuse any change to one's objectives until the appointed task has been completed, yielding a sort of single-minded myopia that dovetails fairly well with the central theme of surrendering all personal initiative that runs through the books.)

After the obligatory dilly-dallying that seems to crop up in just about all of the Dragon Keeper books when danger threatens (in this case, spending lots of time getting to and participating in a big dance party), Bardon discovers the second big "threat" the rears its head to threaten the peacefulness of Amara in the form of swarms of tiny fire-breathing poison-spined black dragons that seem to randomly crop up and mindlessly attack whoever happens to be in their way. Of course, since Kale and Bardon are on the "find the meech colony" quest, there is no possibility that they might investigate where these dragon swarms are coming from instead, no matter how relevant Kale's skills as a "dragon keeper" might be. Instead, Kale and Bardon head off to the northern reaches to find Regidor and Gilda, but not before Mrs. Paul sidetracks the story to show the reader how a secondary character has created the amazing innovation of a magical crystal ball.

One would think that in a series titled The Dragon Keeper Chronicles that being a dragon keeper might be central to the stories. But other than the fact that Kale can find dragon eggs (of dubious value to the plots of the stories), and has a menagerie of trivially useful minor dragons that follow her around, being a dragon keeper doesn't seem to be that big of a deal, despite the constant utterances of other characters about how special this gift supposedly is. In fact, except for the fact that the mindless dragon swarms seem to react quite oddly to Kale's presence, there is no indication that her status as "dragon keeper" is of any value at all, and despite the book heavily featuring the meech dragons and eventually a dragon antagonist, her supposedly incredibly special talents don't feature in this book at all. This should not surprise anyone who has read through the series to this point, as dropping plot threads is more or less Mrs. Paul's stock-in-trade as an author. For example, the plot of DragonSpell revolved around the threatened use of the powers of an unhatched meech egg to create a new eighth "low race" and upset the balance of power in Amara. But once that book concluded, that entire line of thinking vanished from the series, never to be mentioned again. One would think that if meech eggs were this powerful, in a coherently designed fantasy world the meech would live in fear that their eggs would be stolen to be used by some mad wizard seeking power. But since Mrs. Paul isn't really interested in telling a story so much as she is interested in imparting "correct" moral lessons, once the usefulness of a plot device has served its instructive purpose, it seems to be dropped without a second thought.

The story more or less plods on, as everyone stops off in a village to have the usual interruption of their pressing quest to partake in a leisurely round of tea and cakes. Mrs. Paul seems to have figured out that her characters aren't really moving with much urgency, since an earthquake literally shakes everyone out of their complacency. Of course, there are no casualties, because Toopka runs about with Stittiponder (yes, they brought small children on a supposedly dangerous quest) and warns everyone the earthquake is coming. How does she know? Well, like most "knowledge" that people glean in this series, she just knows it presumably via divine inspiration. But rebuilding from the earthquake is interrupted when Kale and Bardon are called upon to rescue Holt from his espionage mission to infiltrate the Followers. While the actual rescue of Holt takes place as part of the narrative of the book, Mrs. Paul is true to form and has most of the interaction with the Followers, like so many of the other plot elements of the book, take place entirely off-stage. Time and again some interesting plot point comes up, and then is resolved entirely out of sight of the reader, only to be reported after the fact. The wizard Namee is tempted to join the Followers and repents, off-stage. Holt convinces many of the Followers to leave the cult, off-stage. Holt rescues the children held by the Followers, off-stage. Paladin is imprisoned by the Followers, off-stage. N'Rae is called in to permit communication with the imprisoned Paladin using animals, off-stage. Paladin's Followers rise up and defeat the Followers, off-stage. In short, almost everything that has to do with the rise and fall of this supposedly sinister threat to all of Amara is too unimportant to actually include in the book as anything other than an afterthought.

And this is because Mrs. Paul feels compelled to introduce a new villain, having either killed off or rendered impotent all of the villains from the previous books. First Risto was the main opponent, and henchman (and rival) to the supposedly even more powerful Pretender. But he was killed off in a wizard duel in DragonQuest. The Burner Stox and Crim Cropper were elevated from Risto's henchmen to main villains, and once again potential rivals to The Pretender (apparently, when you are evil, loyalty is such a foreign concept that every henchman is just itching to bump off their boss and take his place). But they were killed off in DragonFire - Stox almost by accident, and Cropper in a fairly dull fight while riding a dragon. And then at the end of DragonFire Paladin dismisses The Pretender as a nonthreat almost contemptuously, rendering the supposedly dire danger to all of Amara completely impotent with a wave of his hand. While this might be theologically satisfying to adherents to Mrs. Paul's particular brand of faith, it makes for a pretty weak story. And it necessitates producing a new villainous threat to Amara from thin air. So for DragonLight Mrs. Paul conjures up the previously unmentioned (and for the characters in the story, previously unknown) mountain-sized dragon Mot Angra from the weeds out beyond left-field. Mot Angra proves to be the source of one of the two horrible threats facing Amara, while the other turns out to have have an almost entirely random and trivial source. As an aside, one is left to wonder how strong the faith Amarans have in Wulder truly is if it is shaken to its foundation by a threat that has such a minor origin.

But the fact that these threats result from these wild card elements in the story doesn't prove to be a hindrance to the characters, because time and again, Mrs. Paul drives home the point that one shouldn't try to figure out anything on one's own, or even really take the initiative, since Wulder will provide the answer to everything. Several plots points come up that a reader might expect would foreshadow the resolution of the story, but any of these that result from characters using their own initiative to solve a problem all turn out to be red herrings. When Kale and the kimens get close to Mot Angra, their powers over light seem to falter, which leads Kale to speculate that "light" might be a means to defeat the dragon. This turns out to be a red herring. At one point, Regidor heads off to try to consult Librettowitt's extensive library to find out if anyone has ever recorded any weaknesses of the dragon, but this turns out to be a red herring. Regidor's research turns up nothing, and oddly, Regidor's response is to return to join in an effort to defeat the dragon using brute force tactics that everyone had previously agreed simply would not work (and in case you were wondering, they don't). Several characters speculate that Kale's abilities as a "dragon-keeper" might prove to be useful in dealing with the threat of a massive evil dragon. This proves to be a red herring, as Kale's powers prove to be completely useless (seemingly proving yet again that being a "dragon-keeper" is of almost no consequence to the stories). Paladin does solve the mystery of the lost lyrics to a song that is supposedly important for keeping Mot Angra imprisoned, but he doesn't actually do much other than just know what the right lyrics are, and once again, this bit of knowledge proves to be of no consequence in defeating Mot Angra. Basically, the message Mrs. Paul seems intent on conveying is that taking the initiative to solve a problem is just a waste of time. One should simply sit on one's ass and wait for God, excuse me Wulder, to solve them for you.

And Wulder does solve the problem in the end, in a manner that is almost entirely random, entirely unsatisfying, and serves to demonstrate what a dick Mrs. Paul's God really is. Basically, Toopka and Stittiponder (remember, we are taking children along on our dangerous quest into the unknown to confront an otherworldly and as far as the characters know undefeatable menace) are visited by God, er Wulder. Wulder removes a lump from Toopka's heart that has been killing her and cures Stittiponder's blindness. These actions supposedly show Wulder's love, but since Wulder is directly responsible for the debilitating conditions to begin with, the real message is that Wulder is like a firefighter who commits arson so he can be the hero who puts the blaze out. Wulder made Stittiponder a blind street urchin to begin with, so how is it an act of love for Wulder to then cure his blindness? Wulder inserted a ruck hard lump that almost kills her into Toopka's body for his own purposes (more on that later), so how it is an act of love for him to cure her? In short, Mrs. Paul's message, which is supposed to cause the reader to gaze in wonder at the glory of God's (umm, Wulder's) love, really amounts to "Wulder is a complete jerk who uses people like playthings because it amuses him". But Toopka manages to defeat Mot Angra with a device that is literally a deus ex machina that has almost no groundwork laid for it. In short, despite the characters spending much of the latter half of the book worrying about how to defeat Mot Angra and trying to figure out a way to do it, none of that matters and everything is resolved by a plot device that pops up at the last second. Of course, Wulder isn't a kind enough deity to resolve the plot without lots of soldiers and kimens getting killed by the evil dragon, so at least Wulder is consistently portrayed as a dick in the books.

As a bonus, in the final chapter, Mrs. Paul adds in a story about Toopka's background that further reinforces Wulder's dickish nature, as it turns out that she was not just a homeless street urchin. It is revealed that she had previously been a fully grown woman who watched her husband and children get killed and to "spare her the pain" Wulder transformed her into a child and suppressed the bad memories. This apparently allowed Toopka to carry around "Wulder's truth" to be used to defeat Mot Angra. But since, according the the theology of the book, nothing happens without Wulder directing it to be so, rather than sparing Toppka the pain of seeing her entire family killed, Wulder was the agent that caused that pain to begin with. And Wulder presumably did it because, despite being supposedly omnipotent, he couldn't think of a better way to defeat Mot Angra than having a bunch of children killed in front of their mother. It is obvious that Mrs. Paul really wants the reader to come away from her didactic tale with the impression that Wulder is an awesome deity, and by way of analogy, the God at the center of her real life faith is also an awesome deity. But unfortunately, the lesson that the story actually gives is that Wulder is a more evil entity than any of the "villains" that have been propped up to oppose him, and by analogy, so is the version of God that Mrs. Paul is evangelizing for.

In the end, DragonLight and The Dragon Keeper Chronicles lurch to an unsatisfying conclusion. The book closes on a deus ex machina that feels almost like a non-sequitur to the rest of the plot. And since the villain in this book is more or less unconnected to the villains or the plots from the first four books, it seems to not really be a conclusion to the series so much as the point where Mrs. Paul ran out of moralizing lessons to provide so she just stopped writing. In The Lord of the Rings the series stopped when Frodo destroyed the ring, and thus defeated Sauron. In The Chronicles of Narnia the series ended when the world ended. In The Chronicles of Prydain the series ended when Arawn was defeated. In The Dragon Keeper Chronicles the series just peters out without any real sort of overarching triumph or thematic conclusion. As a result, in addition to being didactic and lacking in strong storytelling, the series is also incredibly disjointed. As the conclusion to a weak and unsatisfying series that lacks any kind of continuing story, DragonLight is just not worth bothering with.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less

Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.

Dragons in the Valley is the sequel to The Vanishing Sculptor, and the second book in the Valley of the Dragons series which is a prequel to The DragonKeeper Chronicles series. I say this to point out that if you haven't read the show more previous six tedious books set in Donita K. Paul's world of pseudo-Christian preaching, this book will be nigh incomprehensible if you try to pick it up and read it first. I know this from direct experience, having tried to do exactly that. On the other hand, none of Donita K. Paul's books are really worth reading to begin, so anyone who simply skips them isn't really missing much. To be perfectly honest, the only reasons I kept slogging through these books were (a) a sense of obligation to properly review this book, having accepted it as an Early Reviewer Book, and (b) I kept hoping against hope that they would get better.

So, the question is, did they get better? The answer, unfortunately is "not really". Like all of the other books Mrs. Paul has produced, the book is little more than badly presented Christian apologetics dressed up in fantasy clothing. Though there is a meandering and fairly generic story contained in its pages, the book wanders off to extended digressions about the "principles of Wulder" and unconvincing conversion revelations at the drop of a hat. The overwhelming blandness of the story and the annoying and empty preaching combine to result in a book that isn't even bad enough to despise, but is merely bad enough to dislike.

The book starts out with three characters being given cryptic instructions to steal and separate the statues that were rejoined at great effort in the previous book. Why must they steal the statues? They are just told by the kimens who come and tell them in the middle of the night that they are "in danger" and expected to hop to following these diminutive messengers without question. One of the odder elements of the books is that kimens, as a race, somehow seem to get messages directly from Wulder. Why? Who knows, because it is never explained. No one in the books even really considers to ask the question "why are the kimens always getting messages from Wulder, and how do we know they are actually messages from Wulder, and not just random stuff the kimens invent". Even in Chiril, which is supposed to be very different from Amara because the inhabitants of Chiril have not been "shown the light" of Wulder, everyone seems to think kimens have some sort of special insight. This is yet another of the myriad of ways that Chiril remains exactly the same as Amara. It seems that, having created one fairly bland fantasy culture, Mrs. Paul decided that creating another would be too taxing, and just transferred most everything about the culture of the various imaginary races from one continent to the other.

So, having stolen the statues and cavalierly separated them on the say-so of a trio of random kimens (which in the last book was something that threatened to cause the destruction of the entire world), the heroes are then transported to a secret kimen village (which turns out to be not-so-secret after all, not that this matters) where the statues are reunited. At this point the characters are told that the statues have to be hidden away because the neighboring country of Baardack is threatening to invade, and apparently having the statues fall into the hands of a different hereditary dynasty would be a problem. Presumably this is because the rulers of Baardack or competent, because the rulers of Chiril clearly are not. One also wonders, given the extraordinary amount of pain and suffering that the separation of the statues causes, and since Wulder is supposed to be responsible for all of the events that happen in the world, exactly how big of a jerk is Wulder that he let this all happen. In short, by being responsible for everything that happens in the book, Wulder comes off as a complete dick who seems to revel in the death, pain, and suffering of war. But apparently that's okay, so long as the characters in the book learn the right lessons as a result.

The bulk of the book is punctuated with the drumbeats of impending war between Chiril and Baardack. Everyone knows that war is imminent, including King Yellat of Chiril. Agents from Baardack infiltrate into Chiril and begin making prominent officials disappear. So what is King Yellat's response? To send out Verrin Schope, his dimwitted wife, and a useless giant parrot to hang out in a tavern and try to figure out what is going on. Except everyone seems to know what is going on: everyone figures out almost immediately who the enemy agents are when they stumble into the tavern Verrin and his wife are sitting in. But do they call in agents of the law to apprehend the miscreants? Nope. They just let them continue killing people while trying to figure out how they are getting away with their evil schemes. Here's a clue: they are getting away with their evil schemes because you, Verrin Schope, are letting them. Where Mrs. Paul thinks she is including some masterful espionage intrigue, she just makes the story ludicrous. Verrin and Beccaroon don't have to ferret out how their enemies are doing what they are doing, or lay low, or otherwise keep themselves incognito - they are operating within their own country with the authority of the national government at their back. They can just have the oafish bad guys arrested, which would put an end to the disappearances (which turn out to be assassinations, so by sitting on their hands and wings, Verrin and Beccaroon allow dozens of people to be killed, and a later scene makes this crystal clear, but all Beccaroon does is express momentary regret that his gross incompetence resulted in a wandering man's death at the hands of some ruffians). Making this even stupider, they know that the head of Baardack's forces, Doremattris Groddenmitersay (did I mention how much the names of Mrs. Paul's characters suck) is lurking about. But do they try to stop him and decapitate the leadership of the invasion force? Of course not, so chalk another one up for the message in favor of complete passivity that runs through all of Mrs. Paul's writing.

Meanwhile, the Wizard Fenworth (one of the trio who helped steal the three statues near the beginning of the book) observes a strange and unique creature apparently in the employ of King Odidoddex of Baarack (among her other "gifts", Mrs. Paul is terrible at coming up with names) that is called simply "The Grawl", a creature presented as a feral, almost animal-like hunter that serves as a mercenary. So naturally Fenworth takes one of the three statues and heads off to investigate "The Grawl" (and he's always referred to this way, with a capitalized "The"). Remember, these are the three statues that must stay together or the life of Verrin Schope and the entire existence of the world is endangered. And Fenworth more or less cavalierly picks one up and heads off for a few weeks to follow an interesting creature as it murderously rampages across the countryside. And it turns out that having the statues separated causes a moral malaise to spread throughout Chiril as well, hampering the ability of the nation to prepare to defend itself against the impending invasion, but oddly seems to have no similar effect on Baardack. I suppose that God, I mean Wulder, is a Chiril partisan or something. Of course, Fenworth doesn't actually try to stop "The Grawl", and in the one confrontation with him just sends him away, which allows "The Grawl" to surreptitiously kill dozens of other people. Perhaps it is because they seem to assume that Wulder will make everything turn out okay in the end, but Mrs. Paul's protagonists never seem to consider the consequences of their own inaction.

At the same time, the artist Graddapotmorphit Bealomondore (once again, I'll note how much Mrs. Paul's character names suck), having been more or less randomly gifted with the Sword of Valor by Fenworth, heads out on a "quest" with the librarian Librettowit, the almost completely useless Princess Tipper, and a couple of interchangeable kimens. Along the way, Tipper breaks her ankle, they run afoul of more Baardackian agents, they find Fenworth, and Paladin pops in to drop off a dragon for Tipper and report that the war has actually started. This dire news, of course, prompts Fenworth to take the statues and Librettowit and head off to build a temple for them. Because, as the most powerful wizard in Chiril, it wouldn't make sense for him to help out with the actual war effort. Instead, he runs off to take a month or two to make an elaborate underground sanctuary in a remote part of Chiril. Meanwhile, they send the artist with no military skill and a magic sword and an incompetent princess to join in the war effort. And the only thing that makes sense about that decision is that King Yellat and his trusted advisers seem to be even more incompetent, with Verrin Schope (improbably) and Paladin (inevitably) being the only two who are capable. Because of this, King Yellat doesn't listen to them, and the war goes horribly badly for the Chirilians. One spends a good part of the novel wondering exactly why everyone seems to think it is so important to Wulder's plans to keep the incompetent royal family of Chiril in power. Not that the reader gets to see any of this, because, as usual, all of the action in the book takes place off-stage, and is only reported to the characters in the book (and thus to the reader) as news after the fact. Even the fall of the capital of the kingdom and the death of King Yellat is delivered to the reader as second hand news.

The war might not have gone so badly for the Chirilians, even with their incompetent leadership, but as usual in a Doniat Paul book, everyone seems to stop every couple of pages to have some tea, cakes, and fried fish. And Mrs. Paul feels the need to import more of her made-up food jargon too. Verrin Schope has an innkeeper make beet, carrot, and onion soup, and makes sure to inform everyone that it is chukkajoop. Hollee the kimen cooks jimmin chicken, because just cooking chicken wouldn't be jargon-laden enough. Fenworth introduces daggarts to Chiril, because just eating doughnuts wouldn't be "fantasy" enough. And so on. Even the beastly and supposedly feral "Grawl" turns out to be a dandy who keeps a secret fortress where he takes hot baths, peruses his extensive library, and eats tasty soup and roasted lamb. Everyone, it seems is a gourmet who stops off for hours to take in a seven course meal in the middle of waging a desperate war.

Even with all the stopping to eat leisurely meals, the Chirilians might have fared better in their war if they hadn't always been stopping to gaze in wonder at the world around them and then make the leap from the fact that trees are pretty to the assumption that therefore there must be a creator deity who loves them. This book, more than all the others that came before it in the Amara/Chiril based series, contains some of the most unconvincing "conversion" scenes where characters "find the joy in Wulder" and become believers for little reason other than it makes them feel good in their tummies. These conversion scenes take place in between the extended tedious discussions concerning the principles of Wulder. Actually, lectures concerning the principles of Wulder where Fenworth and Schope drone on with vague and pretty much worthless platitudes. Even the Sword of Valor gets preachy, spewing out random, cryptic messages that the characters mistake for deep, meaningful advice.

So, after all this fumbling about, it turns out that Chiril is defeated, but in the end, Bealomondore and Paladin organize a defense of the Valley of the Dragons against an invading force spearheaded by "The Grawl" and his force of shoergats. "Wait", I hear you cry, "what are schoergats"? I understand your confusion. After all, "shoergats" were not listed among the catalogued seven "high" races and seven "low" races that we were told were perfectly balanced against one another way back in DragonSpell, and adding a new race would change everything with disastrous consequences. But that was before we added meech dragons, minnekins, and grand parrots to the mix, so one more random race thrown in seems to be about par for the course at this point. Shoergats, we are told, are a race of flying creatures that love dragon meat so much and are so ferocious that they hunted dragons almost to extinction on Chiril. But when the big showdown between "The Grawl's" shoergats and Paladin's corps of dragon riders takes place, the shoergats are soundly defeated without any significant losses on the dragon side, and of course, the battle takes place almost entirely off-stage. In the end, "The Grawl" is defeated (and despite The Grawl being obsessed with killing Fenworth, he doesn't even get close to the wizard, being defeated instead by Bealomodore and his magic sword), the invading forces are defeated, and then in a handful of pages the entire fortunes of war change and Baardack is defeated. Tipper, through a bizarre and contrived succession law becomes queen of Chiril, and then Paladin shows up out of the blue to propose marriage to her. Making the Paladin marriage proposal even more bizarre is that through the book, the character who had spent the most time with Tipper was the artist-turned-hero Bealomondore. Mrs. Paul could have had a cliched, although slightly more interesting plot line where Tipper realizes that her infatuation with Paladin is based on nothing more than an immature girl's idealized fantasies and she is actually in love with the man who has spent time with her, who is mostly responsible for converting her to believing in Wulder, who stoood by and protected her, and who has grown from a callow youth into a responsible hero. But no. In Mrs. Paul's world, the idealized adolescent fantasies win out. After an entire book of tedium, all of the plot elements are wrapped up in the most contrived manner possible in about a dozen or so pages.

Basically, this is not a very good book, but this is not unexpected, because none of the previous books set in Mrs. Paul's Chiril/Amara setting are very good books. The sloppy world building, evidenced by the random addition of the shoergats, just shows the level of contempt Mrs. Paul has for the genre she has dressed her preachy pseudo-Christian lecture as. The characters who are supposed to be "colorful" like Princess Peg and Wizard Fenworth are annoying (and in Fenworth's case, come off as idiotic rather than eccentric). The characters who are supposed to be "inspiring", like Paladin, are horribly bland. The characters we are meant to empathize with, like Tipper and Bealomondore are generally unlikable or merely pathetic. The story is a fairly standard fantasy invasion story, only made unusual by the extreme incompetence of the good guys, and made tedious by the inclusion of heaping shovelfuls of didactic pseudo-Christian preaching. As usual, the Wulder described in the book seems to be a complete dick, despite the novel's continual attempts to talk about how loving and kind her is. Of course, he's not so loving and kind to the thousands of people killed, maimed, and wounded by the war he let fester. This book seems like it is singularly ineffective at conveying a message that would be of interest to a nonbeliever, and the deity described in the book is such a jerk that it seems to me that it would offend a believer. In the end, there is just not any audience that I could see to recommending this book to.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less

Q: What would you get if you wrote a fantasy book filled with pseudo-Christian moralizing but left out anything resembling a real story?

A: You'd get the book DragonKnight.

The DragonKeeper Chronicles trudge on in this third installment featuring Bardon, a secondary character introduced in DragonQuest, the previous book in the series. The story moves at a glacial pace, filled with frenetic but pointless action that mostly has nothing at all to do with what little plot the book has, and which show more is periodically interrupted with bits of pseudo-Christian sermonizing that advocate a particularly passive way of dealing with life.

The primary problem with the book is that the plot is basically a haphazard collection of random coincidences strung together that flow by without the characters making any real decisions for themselves. The reason that the characters aimlessly stumble through the events of the book is that the religious message intended to be conveyed is clearly the idea that Wulder (standing in for God) has a plan for everything, and thus there are no coincidences, and the correct course of action is simply to trust in Wulder and everything will turn out okay. This particular piece of religious advocacy in favor of passivity results in a book in which the characters don't actually do much besides react to events as they pop up in front of them, and as one might expect, this makes for a fairly uninteresting story.

The plot of the book, such as it is, involves Bardon setting out on sabbatical for a year of solitude before he decides whether to dedicate his life to serving as a knight of Paladin. When he arrives at his designated sabbatical retreat, he discovers that two emmerlindian women, Granny Kye and her granddaughter N'Rae, and a minneken have taken up residence before him, and they have a quest that needs to be undertaken to boot.

"Wait", I hear you cry, "what the heck is a minneken"? Well, if you must know, it is a miniature race of beings that are somewhat similar in shape and size to a mouse that hails from the previously unmentioned Isle of Kye. This particular minneken, Jue Seeno, has been assigned as N'Rae's protector (although why N'rae needs a mouse-like protector is never really explained, and neither is how Jue was selected for the job). This, of course, runs counter to the assertions in DragonSpell that there are only seven high races and seven low races, and adding more races will somehow cause earth shattering disaster and signal the end of the world. But, given the introduction of the very humanoid meech dragons in DragonQuest, ignoring anything resembling continuity in world-building seems to be a common practice for Mrs. Paul. In short, what seemed like some clever world construction in DragonSpell turns out to have been just a convenient excuse for a plot MacGuffin, and was cast aside as soon as the MacGuffin was no longer needed.

Bardon, of course, cancels his plans to reflect on whether he wants to dedicate himself to Paladin's service, and instead agrees to help N'Rae find her long-lost father who was imprisoned by a spell cast by Risto that will expire and kill him when a particular comet reaches a particular spot in the sky. Apparently Risto would stop by and renew the spell keeping N'Rae's father in his enchanted slumber every now and then, but since he was killed in the last book he can't do that any more. Lest one stop and wonder why Risto would bother enchanting someone under a spell that he had to check back on periodically rather than just, say, killing them, Mrs. Paul throws in some random action to distract us, having Bardon fight a water snake and then a mountain lion before everyone heads out through the conveniently provided magical portal to a nearby city.

Once there, Bardon sets out to earn some money, and coincidentally there is a kindia breeder who needs several of the animals broken and is offering large sums of money to anyone who can. Like most other fantasy elements, the kindia, a sort of oversized horse with a sloped back and a temperamental disposition, are more or less dropped into the story as a plot device without any kind of foundation laid for their existence as an integral element of the fantasy world they inhabit. After Bardon spends a laborious day training a single kindia, it serendipitously turns out that N'Rae has a unique magical ability that makes taming the breeder's remaining stock a swift and easy process. The breeder, after some more plot extraneous action involving a kindia race, tries to rope N'rae and her special talent into his household by trying to get her to marry his son Holt. The characters kind of mill about randomly for a while, fighting random quiss or sea dragons when the novel slows down too much, getting arrested for stealing food for orphans, getting the orphans handed to their care as punishment, having Holt show up running from his creditors while trying to make passes at N'Rae and taking him in as a member of their crew because, as someone points out, they could use an extra strong body to help out on their quest, and he's handy. The strange appearances of quiss are set up as some sort of mystery involving vile experiments by the wizards Burner Stox and Crim Cropper, but this being a book in the DragonKeeper Chronicles, this foreshadowing never leads to any kind of pay off in the story. (In point of fact, despite heavy foreshadowing, neither Burner Stox or Crim Cropper show up in the book at all).

The characters continue to drift along without any real urgency, despite the supposedly tight deadline they are on. As with previous books in the series, there's no problem so urgent that one cannot take time out to sit around and drink tea and eat cakes, or have philosophical discussions about how great Wulder is, or stopping to paint pictures. (Granny Kye, despite being an older emmerlindian, isn't very wise, but has the special ability to paint pictures that reveal a person's inner self. as with most fantasy elements of the book, this ability is pretty much useless in the context of the story being told and provides almost no benefit to her or anyone else in the book, despite it being harped upon constantly). This is, as we are told repeatedly, because Wulder has arranged everything according to his plan, and if one is intended to succeed in one's quest, it will turn out okay for you (and I suppose, if Wulder wants you to fail, you're pretty much screwed). So the characters pretty much just wander vaguely in what they assume is the right direction.

Along the way, random coincidences are seen as the hand of Wulder. Stittiponder, a blind orphaned street urchin who hears the wisdom of Wulder via voices only he can hear who had been very briefly introduced as a friend of Toopka's in DragonQuest, pops up thousands of miles away from where he was living on the streets in Vendela. Regidor returns to join Bardon's quest, although he arrives in response to a summons from Dar. Bardon literally stumbles across a gateway that transports him from the far northern tip of Amara almost on top of Kale, which pulls her into the quest serendipitously, and then drags along the wizards Fenworth, Cam, and Lyll as well as Librettowit, Taylaminkaydot, and Toopka, all of whom are introduced to the story using this incredibly clumsy plot device.

One of the few characters who Bardon and N'Rae actively recruit to join them on their quest to free her father, and one of the few who has specialized skills that could help them, is the mapmaker Bromptotterpimdosset, but since it turns out that he isn't theologically pure, they spend some effort trying to get rid of him. This illustrates that any semblance of plot that shows up in the story is clearly of secondary importance as far as Mrs. Paul is concerned. The important part of the book is providing "correct" moral instruction to the intended young adult audience, and that "correct" moral instruction is basically this: don't make any plans, because God will make everything work out for you, and don't associate with anyone who asks any hard questions, because they might pollute your mind with bad thoughts. Bromp serves up some straw men for Regidor and Bardon to shoot down, and is then converted to following Wulder when a random coincidence happens, because, of course, there are no random coincidences, there is only Wulder's plan.

So, the good guys eventually wander around enough and find the enchanted knights they were looking for by accident and then, well, they don't do much of anything for a while (remember, nothing is so urgent that you can't stop for a long lunch with tea and cake several times). Having spent no time at all trying to figure out how to break the enchantment until they found the knights, they meander about the abandoned fortress where they found them for a while until the answer drops in their lap. By that time, both the Pretender has shown up to cause trouble (but not too much trouble, since the characters are all under Wulder's protection and thus cannot be harmed), and Paladin shows up for a deus ex machina moment and everything is wrapped up in a nice bow - including the sudden revelation that Bardon is the son of one of the freed knights, Kale is the daughter of another, and Bardon and N'Rae are cousins (which conveniently solves the clumsy love triangle that Mrs. Paul has half-heartedly set-up between Bardon, N'Rae, and Kale in a manner reminiscent of the clumsy resolution of a similar love triangle in Return of the Jedi).

With the knights rescued, the random non-threats stop showing up and everyone is reunited with their family members. And in a huge anticlimax the wizard Fenworth permanently changes into a tree and Kale is dubbed the new Bog Wizard to replace him. Having milked about fifty pages worth of plot into a 393 page book, Mrs. Paul finally stops preaching the virtues of wandering aimlessly through life and expecting God, excuse me, I mean Wulder, to fix everything for you and brings the turgid series of moral lessons to an end. With no real story, a pile of foreshadowing that never pays off, a completely random series of events, and a "moral message" that is pretty much a call to passivity, this book is definitely worth missing.

This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less