Driscoll hits hard and fast with this book, the third in his 'Dragons' Bane Chronicles'. Our heroine Dani wakes up one morning and hey, Mervad, her husband of only one day, is dead; eaten by a new dragon we haven't previously met by the name of Gwrana, who's obviously important because she boasts four pairs of horns. Only King Cortiban has more. Dani's dragon friend and mentor, Miazan, survives but is seriously injured fighting Gwrana, so is unable to give chase when she's rescued by a prince on a flying horse. That's not bad for a mere five pages, huh? Oh, and Dani's apparently a Lorac, whatever that means.
There are two immediate takeaways from this first chapter. One is that we have to wonder why it's going down like this, because the first book felt like a setup for the second, which featured a quest that got the series into solid ground. Are we suddenly ditching that just like that and spinning off into a whole new direction? Surely not. The other is that Driscoll has an absolute blast throwing in cliché after cliché only to turn them completely on their heads. He starts out here with a peach, as Prince Eyroc Bimtor isn't merely any old prince on a flying horse; he's her betrothed, to whom she was promised fourteen years ago. She's supposed to be a princess.
As much as I initially puzzled as to where Driscoll was doing, I absolutely adored the way he flouts convention so blatantly. Suddenly, Dani's a princess, rescued from a dragon by a handsome prince. How clichéd is that? Except that she doesn't want to be rescued. She doesn't want to be a princess. She's already married. Oh, and hey, we soon discover that she's pregnant. I love how Eyroc, who's not a bad sort at all, trying to live up to a stereotype and doing pretty well at it, even if privilege drips off him like sweat, is completely flummoxed by the whole thing. To him, everything is going to be the way it's supposed to be and, thus far, it always has been. To Dani, screw that.
And so, realising that she's stuck in a gilded cage waiting to be wed in a year's time, she starts to plan her escape. Meanwhile, Miazan recovers slowly and tracks down where she's at, which leads to the priceless scene where the dragon attempts to rescue the princess from the dashing prince. Driscoll takes this upending of convention seriously and it's the most joyous aspect to this novel. What else worked really well for me was that, even as he veered off in a new direction, he paid a lot of attention to closing loops of plot.
For instance, in the second book, 'Traveler Dani', she promises the people of the starving town of Glenndale that, should she ever encounter King William I, she'll pass on their need for aid. Here, she does exactly that because William is Prince Eyroc's father. Given that Driscoll is clearly paying heed to the principles of Chekhov's Gun, I started to pay a lot more attention to the details than I had previously done. Another example is that her uncle Bixby is the Royal Mage and, during the year she spent apprenticed to him, he wasn't really teaching her to be a merchant; which always seemed a little odd to me, he was teaching her to be a princess, without actually telling her that.
This made me think back to what I might have overlooked in the first couple of books and, while I couldn't think of anything, that doesn't mean it isn't there and it'll become important next time out, in the concluding volume, 'Dani's Choice'. Certainly, I paid attention to a couple of details in this one, wondering why the bread always seems to taste off to Dani and counting the number of horns on Miazan's head. Surely the whereabouts of her necklace is important and the magic spell that doesn't merely make her words heard by everyone in the castle but prevents her from lying just has to come back into play in the fourth book.
I liked this third book a great deal. It's telling that the first was inherently the best in the series, what with it being the only book in the series at the time, but the second was much better, much more focused and much more enjoyable. This third is smooth stuff, highlighting Driscoll's growth as an author, and it's notably better still, which can only bode well for the fourth, 'Dani's Choice', originally the final book in the series, which I've now discovered, courtesy of a message from the author, was first published as a single book.
He also noted that it was written for a tween audience, which makes a lot of sense, even though it's listed in the back as "YA fantasy adventure". I'll have to ask him why he initially published this as a single volume. As individual books, they're not large but they're large enough, especially for tweens, this one a little thicker again than its predecessors. However, four books combined into a single volume must feel like a doorstop to a tween. Was it originally shorter and he rewrote it into these separate volumes or was it always like this, just within one cover? Inquiring minds want to know.
I'm also interested in why I only have the first three books to hand. I must have bought these as a series, but somehow didn't end up with the fourth. Driscoll later added a prequel, 'The 'Dragon's Bane', which gave its name to the series as a whole, and a fifth book, 'Apprentice Eyroc', which is presumably a side story exploring the prince's story rather than Dani's. I can only assume that in 'Dani's Choice', she makes her choice, whatever that will be, and her story's done. Only time will tell! ~~ Hal C F Astell
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