Review: The Dragon Round

The Dragon Round by Stephen S. Power
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The eyes of the dragon go round and round, round and round, round and round. The eyes of the dragon go round and round all through the town... That was the first reaction from my budding reader, when he finally discerned the words on the cover of the book we got in the mail. And that was about the most funny thing about this book too.

The beginning gave me a feeling of something like His Majesty's Dragon, with its very proper and likable captain. Only it's styled as play more than a novel. We get to see the action from many different "perspectives" at once (one scene we read four times through the eyes of four different characters), but it's hard to shake off the feeling those not perspectives really, but remarks in a play: this person says this, while doing that surrounded by this setting and needs to make sure the audience knows that he feels that. Still. it was interesting and enjoyable right till the moment the action moves to a city.

In the city the author switches to a different kind of writing. All we get are snippets and pieces through the eyes of way too many actors, with an exceptions of the ones readers are used to. Now it's more like a movie script rather than a play. I wonder if the author wants a Dragon Round movie all that much. What's disconcerting is that it's not at all like The Count of Monte Cristo with a dragon, all the revenge wasn't carefully planned, it all just sort of happened. Almost everything in this book is just sort of happens, except for a few things we are not properly shown (meaning a character did a lot to make something happen, we are shown the results and hinted that he did it, without any details on how).

The setting is quite interesting though. It's a very grotesque and exaggerated parody on a society. It's not shown very well how it all came to be, but I guess there will be a sequel, so there is a chance of developing those interesting ideas. What surprised me most in the setting is the number of impossibly naive characters. Actually, all the characters in this book are either naive or mentally unstable. which is an interesting view of the world of course.

Now to a disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book via a Goodreads giveaway and, for once, managed to read and review it before the publication date.

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