Customer Reviews

Dragonhaven

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(15)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

About a page and a half into Dragonhaven, I put the book down and thought to myself, "She can't really keep up this annoying first person narration the whole book, can she?" When I think of Robin McKinley, I think of measured, deeply beautiful, polished prose - with a kind of intense, crystalline quality that has always lent itself well to the fairy-tale aspect of her stories. But Dragonhaven is written in the slangy, talky patter of its contemporary teenage narrator, Jake Mendoza. And she really does keep it up the whole way through.

I did eventually grow to like it (McKinley is a wonderful writer, after all, even if this isn't her usual style), but the depth and beauty of the story seems to peek through the clutter of language, rather than channel directly to the reader through the written word. Jake narrates like somebody who is talking a mile a minute and can't stop to catch his breath, let alone go back through to edit and clarify.

The story falls into the popular urban fantasy genre - a recognizable world of today that is subtly skewed by the addition of some fantastical element, in this case the existence of dragons. Jake lives on the only dragon preserve in America, at an institute in the park dedicated to the study of dragons. One day, seemingly by chance, he finds a dragon dying in the woods - a mother dragon killed by a poacher just as she was giving birth. All but one of her baby dragons are dead, as is the man who killed her. Jake, still trying to cope with the loss of his own mother, looks into the dragon's eye as she is dying and is so moved by what he sees there that he decides to do what he can to save the last of the dragon's litter.

The rest of the book is about raising a baby dragon. It's about the bureaucratic mess caused at the park by the death of the poacher, and the practical and philosophical consequences of Jake's determination to save the baby dragon. It's the kind of story that would be impossibly dull if it weren't so magical, and in this case the breathless pace of the narration counterbalances the steady, grim menace of the government and the long, slow struggle to keep the baby dragon alive. It always feels like a lot is happening, like events are just galloping by, even though there's no real action to speak of.

Things definitely get strange when it comes time for the baby dragon to meet her own kind, but that part of the story is too much fun to spoil.

I really enjoyed Dragonhaven, but it didn't move me the way that some of McKinley's other books have (The Blue Sword, Beauty, Sunshine). I'd give it three and a half stars if I could, and I'm rounding up out of a sense of loyalty.

In my opinion, Robin McKinley's greatest strength as a writer is her ability to make the mundane magical or portentous. Her voice is lyric and moving. She used it very successfully to elevate some of her more prosaic, slower-moving books from uninspired to elegant. Her voice is what saved both Rose Daughter and Spindle's End from mundanity, and what made Sunshine and her Damar books such classics.

That voice is missing from this book.

Ms. McKinley, for the first time in her career (as far as I can see), decided to write from the perspective of a teenaged boy. I believe she really struggled to capture the rhythm and honesty of her main character. She adopted a rushed, breathless teenage boy patois scattered with adjectives like "freaking" and "cheezing" that she successfully maintains throughout the ENTIRE book.

Unfortunately.

Her story, although slow in parts, was beautiful and well-drawn. (That's why I gave the book three stars.) However, my pleasure in the story was corrupted by my hatred of her language. It distracted terribly.

Although I am a devoted McKinley fan, I probably would not have purchased this book if I'd known what I was in for.

I have to say right off the bat that McKinley does the teenager viewpoint extremely well (which is why it's not 2 stars instead of 3), but I found it very distracting, repetitious, and so expository in parts that I skipped whole paragraphs at a time to find the story again -- just like the last book I read written from a teen-aged boy's perspective. I liked the story, I liked the setting, I liked the characters, I just didn't like the POV. It was good enough to read in one sitting but that's more a testament to the plot than to Jake's recounting. A big disappointment.

Robin McKinley has long been and still remains one of my favorite writers. Most of her books are marketed to a YA audience but are equally enjoyable by adult readers. While this her latest was intriguing, it failed to engage me on a deep emotional level. I kept saying to myself, 'Well now that is interesting', but without being moved. Perhaps it was because she was using the voice of a teenaged boy, a creature I have never been. In any case, I felt the book was worth reading, but I didn't love it. Too bad; I usually love her books.

One more comment, and this to the publisher of the hardback edition, at this point the only one available. This is quite simply the shoddiest binding I have ever seen on a hardback book. Even paperbacks are generally put together with more care than this was. There is nothing supporting the signatures of the book. I am careful how I handle my books, and my copy literally fell apart in my hands before I had even finished reading it. Shame on Putnam. Respect for the author and reader alike should require better workmanship.

I found this book very difficult to read because of the jocular, stream-of-consciousness narrative. It was disorganized and confusing. I understand what she was trying to accomplish but I don't think it worked. I have really enjoyed her previous works but I am sorry that I purchased this one.

I have greatly enjoyed other novels by Robin McKinley. And I thought this novel presented some very interesting ideas. I found the book hard to get through, however, because of the writing style that was used. The first person, stream-of-consciousness style would have worked for me in a short story or novella, but in this longer form, I sometimes felt like pulling my hair out! I almost abandoned it several times. I understand that this was supposed to be the narrative of a teenager boy, but some sentences just went on, and on...and on. I enjoyed the story itself, but it was an effort to get through the style in order to get to the final outcome. It would have benefited from some (a lot of!) editing, I think.

I agree with most other posters. Although I feel guilty even writing this review (since I have enoyed McKinley's prose so much in the past), I have to say I didn't even finish this book. The runon stream of consciouness style just didnt engage my attn. I tried and tried and wanted to like this book, but after page 150, I gave it up. Instead of feeling pulled in by the action, I always felt left outside as though I was just reading a history book rather than a story/narrative. The sentence structure/tone etc. reminds me of RM's blogs rather than the former beauty of her prose as well. It got a bit annoying because I had TRY to keep my attn on the page to follow the convoluted sentences. The imagery she usually uses isn't present in the novel either for the most part. Maybe for me, its that this novel was about a boy as well, usually her novels reveal insights into female lives and this novel just didn't seem.. genuine... Wah! Next time...

This is not another cutesy story about telepathic dragons. This story is about how anybody ever succeeds in communicating. McKinley is remarkabley convincing in her teenage protagonist and his first person story.

The concentration on the theme of communications is what makes this different and intriguing. The narrator's constant attempts to find ways to tell us, the readers, the story are echoed in his attempts to reach the dragons. It is rare to find such a clear portrayal of the difficulties of presentation and interpretation of information and ideas between truely different parties.

Language shapes how (and what) people can think. Concepts exist in some languages that are unthinkable in others. Languages reflect what is important to their native speakers. That is what we refer to in the old example of all of the various words for snow and its different conditions in the Eskimo tongue. Anyone who has attempted to do translations from one language to another is familiar with the problem.

How we might communicate with an alien species must be, at heart, a speculation on what they would find important and worthy of description and of contemplation. I find it quite believable that the dragons of Shadowhill would think so differently from us that interpretation or translation would be virtually impossible. McKinley makes it clear to us how inadequate our language is in this process. She shows us how perhaps the only way such a communications chasm might be overcome is by having infants and children reared 'bilingually'.

McKinley's prose has, in past, been impressive. Clear, evocative, moving, frequently poetic. The fact that this book is written the way it is reflects her expression of the inadequacy of language in the story the narrator has to tell. This point could never have been made so persuaively in easy flowing narration. As readers, we are forced to recognize the difficulty a teenager, a misfit (and what teenager has not felt like one), and a human being has abt trying to convey what, in essence, is a first contact with an alien culture.

Every character in the book is shown in terms of their deficiencies in their abilities to communicate. From the Native American who won't speak English to the grief stricken father. Shadowhill can't communicate with the outside world any better than the outside world's media can reach the public.

What better a subject for a young adult novel?

As a teacher of middle school-aged children, I have read most of Robin McKinley's books and have loved nearly all of them. However, this is perhaps the worst book of her collection--I fail to see how it made it past her editors. The ideas are wonderful, as always. The way she depicts the baby dragon, Lois, and her characterization of Jake are superb. I love the part about how Jake figures out dragon "language." But the reader is always distanced from the action. The entire piece is narrated so that the reader is told about actions but lives through none of them. I am generally a voracious reader who thinks of reading as a treat. But I have dawdled through this book for months until it almost became an assignment. I could not let it go completely because the ideas and creation of a different reality are so intriguing. But I often find myself falling asleep after a page or two.

I didn't find the narrator's voice realistic or authentically "teenage," especially for a boy. I found it annoying. Lots of "Okay, the closest thing that I can tell you was that it was like this. Well, not really like this, but more like that. A THIS kind of that. Words just don't work, you know?" A whole book in that style, relentlessly, on every page. I found myself skipping the middles and ends of many paragraphs, and that's not a pleasant way to read.

That said, I did enjoy the characters and the idea of a huge dragon reserve in Wyoming. The politics had tons of potential as an interesting side of the story, but were too simplified and sometimes inexplicable to really dig my teeth into. In particular, the shtick about "dragons are protected, but it's massively illegal for anyone, including a ranger, to help one survive" didn't make sense and was not believeable.

I felt a big "wouldn't it be cool" rush of energy around this book, but the story-telling and details were not pinned down or thought out well enough to sustain interest. Then the narrative voice just swamped it all. Skip this one unless you read every dragon book that comes out.