Asteroid Made of Dragons by G. Derek Williams
☆☆☆
Published by Sword & Laser
Expected Publication Date : April 5th, 2016
Available as Paperback & eBook – 260 Pages
Source : NetGalley, Thank you!
Official Sword & Laser Selection!
When a lone goblin researcher stumbles across an artifact containing a terrifying message—that the world is in grave and immediate peril—she scrambles to find help. A very unusual asteroid (one constructed as a cage for dragons) is headed straight for the planet, and Xenon is the only person in the world who knows. As she clambers across hill and dale with her quill, journal, and dwindling coin purse to untangle the mystery, she’ll need plenty of luck to find the right clues and the right sort of help.
Meanwhile, our heroes have their own problems. They have a bank to rob, a sea to cross, and a kingdom to infiltrate. Luckily, Rime is a wild mage—the laws of reality quiver when she gives them a stern look—and her guardian, Jonas, wields a reasonably sharp sword. But Rime is slipping ever closer to the abyss of madness, and Jonas is wanted for murder at their final port of call. To make matters worse, the mage-killing Hunt and its commander, Linus, follow the duo like a patient shadow, bent on Rime’s destruction.
When the wise are underfunded, the brave are overbooked, and the cruel are unconcerned, can the world be saved from destruction?
Thoughts:
Asteroid Made of Dragons starts off strong with a non-human protagonist that I almost immediately fell in love with. A goblin researcher named Xenon is way, way more invested in getting information and learning about the ancient races than she is in anything else – including her seeming safety. She stumbles upon an artifact that tells of some thing coming, something called Shame and with it Zero will rise.
From there I was hooked on for her story, but the novel also follows a mage on the cusp of being driven mad by her Wild Magic, a squire who does his best to care for her, and the almost immortal being who seems (in my opinion) to have completely lost his mind. We bounce between them, seeing the story as it develops and changes from each’s perspective. Which is always, for me, a clever and unique way of telling a story. I love separate narratives that wind up through crazy turns of events locked together. It’s something that tickles me so much.
But the story was lacking something too, there was nothing that quite had me wanting to pick it back up after that first chapter. I loved our little goblin character but her chapters seemed few and far between when sprinkled between the rest of our cast that I struggled to connect with. This turns out to be due to the fact that this is a third book in a series, something I hadn’t seen or heard in any previous reviews. The previous books look as if they follow our mage and squire, and I can see that if you’ve read those previous books you’ll clearly have more of a connection there. I didn’t, so it was very hard for me to care and some of the reactions and actions of these characters seemed a little over the top or childish.
That’s ultimately what lost some stars with me, it was a big enough deal through my reading to make it hard to pick up, hard to follow, and hard to finish. I’d say you may want to read the first two books in the series before picking this up. Had it not been for that I would have loved this book for just the characters alone. I may one day pick up copies of those first two and return to this, we’ll see. It’s a fun, imaginative, and well written read for the most part – just be sure to read those previous novels.
***I was provided a free copy of this book for review from NetGalley by the publishers, thank you! My review is my own thoughts and opinions and not swayed in anyway.***
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