Customer Reviews

Iron Dragons

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Wow.

That pretty much sums up my reaction to reading this book.
Derek P. Gilbert's first published novel is nothing short of excellent. To be honest, I wasn't expecting it to be this good... and I'm tempted to say it's even better than the two novels I've read by his wife.
Iron Dragons is a "fantasy" novel in that it's set in a medieval-type world with dragons, inns along the road, and plenty of ale to knock out the itinerant dragon-slayer. Throw in a crazy ragamuffin dog, a priest that's either incredibly brave or incredibly thoughtless, a stable-hand that is quite the man of the world, and another interesting* character or two, and you've got an excellent read. There's action, humor, character development, excellent world-building. And the writing-style is excellent.

Go buy this book. Now.


[...]

Iron Dragons is a devil-may-care romp through a not-quite generic fantasy setting.

The book begins by suggesting at a fantasy mystery tale but the mystery bit is neither expanded nor is any effort given to explore the possibilities. Questions are raised, dropped, then either answered incidentally later on or never broached again. The characters fail to stand out as individuals, rather they remain just that: characters. With no depth or complex motivation, they never surprise or adapt according to their surroundings. They assimilate what should be incredible changes to their view of their world with little more than an, "Oh, okay!" and grasp alien concepts with only a parody of confusion--limited to language barrier "magic translator" gaffes. One of the characters regularly possessed knowledge outside his short exposition. I constantly suspected he would be revealed as an ex-horse-thief or some form of reformed criminal entrusted with an important task due to a past known to the guard captain that sent him; I even thought he may have been lying about much of his story for a time. The character's background was never explored past his initial introduction. Part-way into the tale a dog character is introduced with no purpose but to server as an occasional and particularly jarring Deus-Ex-Machina, to the point of even being utterly forgotten amidst fast moving scenes.

The dragons of the story are simple two-dimensional antagonists. Their motives are explained entirely by declaring them monsters that attack people counter-intuitively for food and sport, despite the author attributing them with human-esque intelligence. At the beginning of the story, the dragons are shrewd and malevolent tyrants that represent the world's greatest threat. By the end, they are mindlessly selfish and predictable clowns that almost server no point but to occupy a page of distraction. Every fight with the beasts ends abruptly through some shortcut that belittles the oft-lauded threat they should pose.

After all of that, it seems the book should have been unreadable at best. Most of my complaints were only obvious in retrospect. The action and questions posed, even when abandoned or later answered in passing, kept me interested enough to make Iron Dragons a good page turner. The overall story is strongly reminiscent of Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, with minor Sci-Fi elements dropped into an otherwise High Fantasy setting.

Ultimately, I would recommend the book as a Young Adult title to High School students looking for a fun and low-introspection escapism story.