Returner’s Wealth by Paul Stewart
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
RETURNER’S WEALTH offers a unique take on dragons. These aren’t your cartoon dragons that can be cuddly while they train; they (and their riders) will take down the humans that hunt them. This book is full of glorious, sometimes overwritten detail; clearly the author spent some time world-building. There are several points of view, including those of dragons, which can be confusing. This could be a good thing, though, because it presents the alien thoughts of the wyrmes.
The wyrmeweald is a harsh, unforgiving place, and the characters ignore this to their peril. No one emerges unscathed, and there is plenty of violence. The pace of the book is sometimes slow, but the ending ramps up the tension, and I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. There is some romance (which has consequences), but nothing too overt. However, the romance scenes and the violence make this book more appropriate for older YA readers.
One thing I wasn’t so keen on was the author’s practice of combining words (like “hackdagger”), even if they are usually done in a poetic fashion. They weren’t hard to figure out, but they dropped me out of the story a little bit because they aren’t common. The illustrations were a welcome addition, though, even in the ebook version. The pictures helped flesh out the world of the characters, which were sometimes lacking in much more than greed as motivation.
Overall I liked the story, though I feel like I would have been more interested had the beginning moved a little faster. There is much more to this world and many questions left to answer, so hopefully future books in this series will get to the action sooner.
Received as a free digital ARC via Netgalley and the publisher.
tags: dragon, earcs, ebook, fantasy, outdoors, netgalley