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| Dragon's
Treasure by Elizabeth A. Lynn check out website: www.penguin.com
There is a dragon that is actually a changeling
who spends most of his time as a man. He is in love with a minstrel and partakes
in a homosexual relationship, but he also loves a woman that is the daughter of
the woman that his father had an affair with. Maia, whom Golden Dragon loves, has a brother which we are led to believe is the bastard son of Golden Dragon's father, Black Dragon. Treion the Bastard as he calls himself vows to avenge his mother because she marries another lord who is a mean tyrannical man, so Treion decides to trailblaze through his land thieving and raping as he goes.
That doesn't even cover a tiny amount of the full story, but to try to
do this would end in several pages of trying to untie a knotted ball of wool.
It's as if Lynn doesn't know where she wants to take a single thread and so meanders
along a path that is as bland as treadmill walking. The story claims
to be a romance, yet we very rarely see any sign of romance. It is a fantasy with
a despot dragon overlording humans, but there is very little to actually make
the reader dislike Dragon as he comes across as a pussycat. He isn't technically
even the lord of the whole realm. Lynn's sex scenes are awful, they are much like
the rest of the book. Poorly drawn and inadequate in purpose. One of
her characters, Hawk, is a changeling and can hear other minds. She actually comes
across as a female version of the Hawk in the TV version of 'Buck Rogers', tacky
and deplorable. Other characters are severely flawed. For one thing, we have two
that have the same name because of the lack of their description and portrayal,
you cannot really decipher who is who apart from the main players. Elizabeth
Lynn's characters are shallow. She draws them in a stark almost naive way that
doesn't engage the reader, their speech and inner feelings are contrivances of
an unskilled hand. Children are unrecognisable, their little nuances suggesting
that Lynn has spent very little, if any time around children. A four-year old
boy comes across as much more of an eight-year old and, had we not been told,
near the end, that he was so young I would never have known. The names
of characters are just silly, Edric Edricson and Angelo Angelino. Characters are
named twice to add to the confusion, Karadur Atani aka Dragon for one and Terrill
Chernico aka Hawk for another. I can't honestly encourage anyone to
read this book. There is nothing good I can say about it and sadly cannot even
pretend that this was a missed opportunity on the author's part. Maybe if the
threads were separated and made into two books it might have worked although it
wouldn't change the fact that there really isn't a story to engage readers here,
no matter how it is presented. I'd just like to ask if this book is
a joke? No, seriously, it comes across as a blatantly badly written book with
no direction and little flare for the trade of storytelling. It almost seems that
Elizabeth Lynn doesn't care about the story or its characters while she tells
you her tale. It begs the question, what happened to the two-time award winning
writer? Donna Jones
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OTHER REVIEWS - September 2004
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Normally,
round about here, I tell you what the book is about and give a soundbite version
of the full story. Unfortunately, part of the problem with this very strangely
written piece is that I cannot honestly say I understand the motivations of the
writer or her story.
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