Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. And their daughters, every once-in-a-while. Not an actual dragon, just a wizard who is called the Dragon, who happens to be the lord of the valley, and to whom they all owe their fealty and tribute. Join my Story Circle to sample my own fiction and receive a free copy of my first novel, The Song of the Sirin, as well as a prequel novella to the Raven Son series and a comic fantasy short story.Synopsis: Every ten years, a village in the valley must give up one of their daughters to the Dragon.
Then the romance intrudes again at the very end, and changed what would have been an easy 5 star into a barely 4 star book.
The images I have still with me are almost all from the last forty pages of the book, which were simply masterful. I almost wish that the backstory would have been more of the “front story” in this case, because it was rich and deep and rewarding. Still, the central conflict, the amazing Polish woodsy setting, the “bad guy”, and the “big reveal” at the end were magical. This is also a matter of personal preference, but the light tone of most of the novel also didn’t fit the rather graphic sex scene in the end of the book. Their intimacy in magic would have worked far better if it didn’t have the sexual aspect. It’s as if in the middle of a Mozart opera somebody suddenly starts to scream “The Ride of the Valkyries” at the top of their lungs. Then, suddenly, there’s this sexual intimacy and tension. An intense empathy between people sharing a creative act. I was breathless as I read it, mostly because the process she described was so similar to the kind of intangible magic that occurs in choirs when performing on stage. There is this amazing scene when Agnieszka first discovers her wild magic together with the Dragon. And the sex was catastrophically misused.
There were almost no compelling reasons for the two leads to fall in love. It felt like the romance was tacked on afterwards. The “beauty and the beast” aspect of the novel is, I think, sadly out of place. When that happens, you can’t give less than four stars. Now, a month after finishing it, some of the scenes still “flash upon that inward eye”. When I finished this book, I was sure it would get no more than a 3 star rating.
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