I’ve taken a look at Dragon Speaker and Dragon Child… so it
only makes sense I take a gander at Dragon Blood as well, right? I was
overwhelmingly positive for both first and second Shadow War Saga books, so I
really hope that book three can live up to their reputation as well! Without
further ado, this is Dragon Blood by Elana A. Mugdan. Spoilers ahead.
Now having lost the second confrontation with Necrovar and
somehow ending up at the other side of the world, Keriya must take her time to
recover from the traumatic experiences that took place and find a new way to
bring down the evil warlord. She makes new friends and trains in the new land
she’s in, but even there, nothing is without its threats. She starts to seek an
arcane power that can somehow overpower Necrovar, which hopefully can help her
in her quest to defeat him.
I think this is another very good installment in this series
that so far has hardly ever disappointed me. I feel like this one allows us to
have a little more breathing room, as we have Keriya recovering from her clash
with Necrovar and the aftermath. I definitely appreciated the author shedding
even more light on how traumatized Keriya’s become from all of this. She went
from being an outcast in a small village to a war hero who has lost so much,
which obviously really affected her. She even thinks she lost Fletcher, Roxanne
and the rest, though that is later (luckily) proven to not be the case.
Honestly, that wasn’t a big twist for me, I never taught them to be dead.
Still, it was nice to have a break from their POVs to
properly explore Keriya’s inner thoughts, as well as those of Viran, her new
mentor and later friend. It took me a while to warm up to the latter, but I
started to care more for him by the mid-point of the book. He’s still not grown
quite as much on me as Fletcher and Roxanne, but they also took their time for
me to connect with.
I did unfortunately find this book a bit less engaging than
the last two, at least the first third or so. While it’s interesting to be in
this completely new culture and land on the other side of the world, I didn’t
much enjoy this new sexist society a lot. There’s already quite a bit of sexism
going on in Allentria itself, with there being no female soldiers that I could
tell, but it’s far, far worse in this kingdom. I guess it’s supposed to be a
positive that at least this time it’s addressed and the author does something
with it, but I still wasn’t a fan and it felt a bit unnecessary since they
later proceeded to ignore the sexism in favor of having Keriya train anyways
after she proved herself. I’m just not a big fan of it, especially since
misogyny in fantasy books already is so very prevalent.
I also just didn’t connect well with this kingdom. It wasn’t
an appealing location, I didn’t care for most of the characters that inhabited
it, etc. The only real connection I felt to the story at this point was Keriya
and her arc and of course learning more about magic in this world, but other
than that my attention span kind of started to falter here. It was then
followed by a trip across the sea (which also didn’t much appeal to me) until
we finally got back to the empire we all care about, which is now being ruled
by Necrovar. It’s just very devastating to see that this place we spend so much
time in is now basically overrun with demons and evil soldiers. Ah, well, at
least we get a (mostly) happy reunion between our beloved mains. Pretty
heartwarming stuff.
The journey to find a magic source to summon the dragons was
much, much more interesting than the first part of the book if you ask me. I
simply loved seeing Keriya and her friends work as a unit again, which has been
quite a while at this point. We get some very interesting revelations, and the Bogspectre (yes, he is still my favorite character) ends up playing a rather
big role.
The climax is this time maybe not as memorable, but still a
really good one. Move aside demons, the dragons are here. We get once more a
very exciting revelation regarding one of our major characters as the final
sentence of the epilogue. Can I just say: called it? Yes? No? I’m going to do
it anyways. Called it.
Overall, I still definitely recommend picking up Dragon
Blood. The first third may be a bit harder to get through, at least for me, but
the payback in the last half is absolutely worth it. Mugdan continues to
improve her writing and I absolutely can’t wait for the next book to come out!
Rating: 4/5
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