Review for Dragon's Milk

The Dragon Chronicles: Dragon’s Milk by Susan Fletcher

Publisher: Aladdin Paperbacks ®

Summery:

[From Back Cover]

 

“You must go to the dragon. You must leave tonight.”

Before she even hears the words, Kaeldra already knows what she must do. She must search out the mother dragon whose draclings have just hatched and somehow get some of her precious milk. It’s the only way to save her foster-sister’s life. Kaeldra would rather not go. It’s much too terrifying, much too dangerous. But Kaeldra also knows that she’s the only one who can do it. For she is the only one who can actually communicate with dragons.

But little does Kaeldra know what she’s getting into. She’s about to begin a journey that will entwine her fate with that of three little draclings and one would-be dragonslayer. A journey that will become a struggle for life.

 

Introduction:

I’m the kind of person who has always been fascinated by dragons, huge, fire-breathing lizards that just scream power. There’s a part of me that wish they were real, and then there’s the sensible part of me that tells me that’s a bad idea. I don’t want to get crispy fried by one. But stories filled with dragons have always been my favorites. If there’s a dragon mentioned in the description, or pictured on the cover, it immediately catches my eye and causes me to pick the book up. I didn’t pick this book because of the cover that’s on the copy I own though. I was on the website called DeviantArt, and I was looking through an artist’s work, when I came upon one with a girl and three little dragons. The artwork was beautiful and so detailed. When I read the description, the artist said they had painted this for the cover of a book called Dragon’s Milk. I thought it was an odd name, mainly because dragons are lizards and lizards don’t give milk. So, because of the title, I searched for the book. I didn’t find it for a while. Granted, I didn’t look too hard for it. It was a mild curiosity that had me looking for it at all. But then one day, my library was having a book sale, and I came across the book. It didn’t have the beautiful cover art that first got me interested in it, but the cover is still nice. I got the book, sat it on my shelf at home, and then forgot about it for a year or two. The only reason I picked it up now was because I had challenged myself to read a certain number of books this year, and since the year is almost over, I picked out a short one so I could meet my goal. (I finished with one day to spare. Yay!)

Characters:

So, the main character is a girl named Kaeldra. I don’t remember if the book mentioned her exact age, but she seems to be in her late teens. She is an oddball where she lives. Everyone around her is shorter than her, and they have brown eyes and straight, black hair. Kaeldra, however, is taller than all of them, has wavy, blonde hair, and mysterious green eyes. She lives with her step-family, Granmyr, Ryfenn, Mirym, and Lyf. Ryfenn, the mother of Mirym and Lyf, doesn’t really like Kaeldra, and calls her a farin. I was never able to determine what the characters meant by farin. There was no explanation, so my only guess was fair or fairy, since the words sound similar. There are no fairies in this book, so I still don’t quite know the meaning. Granmyr, which means Grandmother, is the one who brought Kaeldra into the family after her mother died. Mirym and Lyf love Kaeldra as a big sister. So, Kaeldra has a pretty loving family besides Ryfenn.

Granmyr also has a type of magic where she can see things when she works at her clay wheel. It’s pretty interesting, the clay works into different shapes that show Granmyr many things she wouldn’t know otherwise. Granmyr is also the one who knows the meaning of the storm and earthquake that suddenly came upon them at the beginning of the book. She knew it meant that there was a dragon hatching. She’s also the one who sends Kaeldra out on her journey.

There’s also a young dragonslayer who comes up after Kaeldra finds the dragons. His name is Jeorg Sigrad, and he’s similar in appearance to Kaeldra. He’s tall, his hair is slightly darker than hers, and he has blue eyes. He’s there to slay the dragon, and when Kaeldra leaves with the draclings, he gives chase, and they always have to be one step ahead of him. I enjoyed his character in the moments he was there, and wish that the author had included him more than she did. I only got glimpses of him until the very end of the book.

My Thoughts:

I don’t really know if I enjoyed this book or not. There’s such a mixed up jumble of good and bad in it. The story is interesting, but it starts out fast, and by fast, I mean hardly any buildup. Kaeldra’s youngest sister, Lyf, gets sick out of the blue, and I have no idea how she contracted the disease. It wasn’t until later that the author mentioned that the year before someone else had gotten the sickness and died from it. Going by the description on the back of the book, I thought that Kaeldra would have to go on a journey to find the mother dragon to get the milk which is the only cure for Lyf’s disease (How convenient a dragon shows up just before the girl gets sick). Kaeldra finds the dragon almost immediately, and gets the milk, but has to return again to watch the three draclings so the mother can hunt. After the little sister is getting better, Jeorg Sigrad shows up, saying he’s been sent to kill the dragon. Kaeldra doesn’t tell him anything about the draclings and their mother however. Eventually, Kaeldra has to leave with the draclings to keep them safe. There’s a place where she can get them where they will be protected from people who want to kill them.

The writing in this book is juvenile, that is because it’s a book for younger readers, but even so, there are many sentence fragments, and confusing narration. The author kept throwing new things in the story that were never foreshadowed. Like the reason the bad guy wanted to kill the dragons. Apparently, there was a war brewing against some country that wasn’t mentioned before. Seriously, something that major to the plot and you’re not going to mention it until the last chapter when everything is unraveling and the dragons and people are fighting for their lives? And also, there was a romance thrown in there at the end as well. I thought, “Hey! Where’d that come from? There was no build up and these two characters have barely talked to each other!” I did see it coming from the moment this character was introduced, but still, there was no buildup or hardly any interaction between the characters. At the beginning of each chapter, the author included quotes from “The Bok of Dragons” which is a book about the slaying of dragons, and also letters and wise sayings from the world in this story. That would have been neat normally, except each quote told what was going to happen in each chapter. Seriously, I’m not kidding. I’d read one of them and know that something was going to happen to this character, a traitor was going to be revealed in this chapter, some character is going to die this way, or this person shouldn’t be trusted because he wants to do something similar to what the quote is talking about. So basically, the book was giving spoilers away. I didn’t like that aspect at all, and I do believe the author should have left those out. They didn’t add much to the story, and only summarized each chapter.

The baby dragons were cute to begin with, but as they got older, they only got annoying, disobeying Kaeldra at every turn, and causing unnecessary problems for her. I also couldn’t quite understand how big these draclings were supposed to be. The author mentioned they were as big as wolves, and yet, they could all fit in Kaeldra’s lap. Either wolves in this world are the size of foxes, or Kaeldra is a lot taller than I originally thought. It just seemed like they were as big as what was convenient at the time. Also, the way the book described their flying was so odd. The baby dragons inflate and float like balloons! Kaeldra would even have to tie them to the ground to keep them from floating away in their sleep. To come down, they have to release a burst of flame to descend. It’s almost like a hot air balloon in reverse! The image of puffed up baby dragons floating around was hilarious and seemed like something out of a silly cartoon instead of a fantasy book.

The ideas were interesting and the journey Kaeldra and the draclings had to go on kept me reading. The characters were likable, and the draclings were even enjoyable when they weren’t being disobedient. But there was just so many weird things, like plot points thrown in without any explanations before or after, and just too many convenient occurrences for Kaeldra that the journey seemed way too easy. Even so, I think I enjoyed it, even though half of the book annoyed me and didn’t make much sense. This book is the first in a trilogy, but I won’t be checking out the rest of them, not if they’re written like this one.

Warnings:

There isn’t much in this book that could be considered scary, there are some scenes when the dragons are attacked by wolves and then another scene when one is attacked by a dog and the dragons retaliate with fire. The book was written for children, and is a decent read. There are a few mentions of “the gods” being angry at the people, so it isn’t a Christian book, and some parents of young children may not feel comfortable with multiple deities. It’s actually just a brief mention, and then never brought up again, so I didn’t see much of a point in it in the first place.

My Age Rating: 8-10 year olds will probably enjoy it, any older than that and I don’t think they’ll care for it too much.

~Cya! And I hope all of you have a very Happy New Year. :-)