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2.89 AVERAGE
2.89 AVERAGE
Good dinosaur mounted combat scenes, a few viewpoint characters who are all interesting, some political maneuverings that don't all get explained until later books -- it is definitely setting up for a sequel (or more). Also had some lovely turns of phrase here and there (the whole book was well written but every once in a while there would be a sentence I'd have to read again just to appreciate it more.)
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O, Dinosaur Lords, how much I was looking forward to you! The idea of combining knights and dinosaurs just sounded so great, it had to be great. Then the reviews started to come in, and they were not that enthusiastic, but I held a copy in my hand, and the drawings were so nice. It had to be good. Needless to say, my expectations for this one were sky high.
It managed however to bother me from page one. It starts saying that this world in which it plays is not like Europe, and the book goes on to be one of the most Europe-like settings I've read in a long time. Admitted, it's more like Spain than England, but all the names are like in Europe, just slightly different. It would need a good story and lots and lots of Dinosaurs to make up for the bad start.
Unfortunately, at the end of The Dinosaur Lords, I felt disappointed. It was an okay story, but in a field so heavily populated as High Fantasy it is easy to get lost between all the other stories out there. You'll need something that adds to your story and there was this perfect chance: Dinosaurs. I thought they played too little a role. At times I almost forgot they were there. A shame.
While it was a fast read, it was not the book I'd hoped for.
O, Dinosaur Lords, how much I was looking forward to you! The idea of combining knights and dinosaurs just sounded so great, it had to be great. Then the reviews started to come in, and they were not that enthusiastic, but I held a copy in my hand, and the drawings were so nice. It had to be good. Needless to say, my expectations for this one were sky high.
It managed however to bother me from page one. It starts saying that this world in which it plays is not like Europe, and the book goes on to be one of the most Europe-like settings I've read in a long time. Admitted, it's more like Spain than England, but all the names are like in Europe, just slightly different. It would need a good story and lots and lots of Dinosaurs to make up for the bad start.
Unfortunately, at the end of The Dinosaur Lords, I felt disappointed. It was an okay story, but in a field so heavily populated as High Fantasy it is easy to get lost between all the other stories out there. You'll need something that adds to your story and there was this perfect chance: Dinosaurs. I thought they played too little a role. At times I almost forgot they were there. A shame.
While it was a fast read, it was not the book I'd hoped for.
I'm 120 pages into this and am giving up. I just don't care what happens to these characters.
Very weird, but fun in the sense that the author was clearly as big a paleontology nerd as he was a medieval history nerd.
Ho boy. I didn't expect much from this book to be honest - the concept of dinosaur knights in medieval Europe is pretty bloody pulpy - but I got even less than that. Gave up on this one about 60% of the way in.
Where to start. Speaking of starts, the book took until about 100 pages in to actually pick up - everything before that is either an extended prologue, or hamfisted character introductions which completely failed to impress any interest or empathy upon me. Conversations would proceed slowly, drawn out - everything was 'exclaimed' or 'cried'.
For the setting, I guess setting it in a sort of alternative Europe and Spain in particular (I think?) is a neat idea but I'm not entirely sure why it was that way at all. I think a new, fictional world would have worked just as well - probably better. As it was, the writing would switch into other languages for some portions, especially character dialogue, for flavour - but it wasn't consistent. A character would be called Condesa one paragraph and Countess/Count the next - Mister and then Maestro. If you're going to use foreign languages and titles, more power to you - just pick one and use that. Another example is the Life-to-Come cult/religion/whatever. Wait, no, Vida-la-Viene. No, Life-to-Come. Switch, switch, switch.
Dinosaurs are worked into a medieval setting in a surprisingly deft way. They don't feel unnatural or out of place, and one of the neat things is that they each have a different name from whatever-osaurus. Parasaurolophus is 'sackbut', due to the trumpeting noises it makes sounding like an instrument, Deinonynchus are called 'horrors', for obvious reasons. However the author seems to forget his fictional names for the dinosaurs occasionally, I spotted at least two instances of him calling a Corythosaurus (a 'morion') a sackbut, or vice versa. Not major, but a bit sloppy nevertheless. Also a couple of inaccuracies, as far as you can be inaccurate about something we don't know much for certain about - saying that hadrosaurs would walk on their hind legs and gallop on all fours? Please. You try galloping with those stumpy front legs. They'd sprint on their hind legs if anything, using the momentum to keep themselves from falling forwards. Anyway, I digress.
The writing fluctuates between passable and cringeworthy. Particularly one particular sex scene (thankfully the only one I read in my time with the book) which had all the subtlety and wit of two teenagers cybering.
"Strong, long-fingered hands molded her buttocks as if he were a blind artist and meant to sculpt them"
This is the kind of shit I wrote when I was in Year 9, bad harlequin romance crap. Speaking of crap, on p. 63;
"Lupe scowled, which her single brow equipped her well to do."
...and on p. 162;
"Lupe scowled. Her single heavy brow equipped her well to do so."
Not going into how clumsy those sentences are in isolation, using the same description for a character - down to the wording - 100 pages apart? This is rookie stuff.
And the plot? Well it couldn't hold my interest after 280~ pages, and it showed no signs of picking up in the near future. The characters are bland and uninteresting, the plot is kept apparently intentionally vague and mysteeeeerious, unless literally "Go to this place and train some men" and "Go to this place and kill some men, also your girlfriend is cross with you for killing those men" was the plot. In which case, what a waste of my time.
I've given it 2 stars rather than 1 because honestly I could probably have dragged myself through the rest of the pages, so it wasn't completely awful. It's just, [b:Seveneves|25202313|Seveneves|Neal Stephenson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1427127116s/25202313.jpg|42299347] got here and why bother reading this tripe when I could be reading that?
Where to start. Speaking of starts, the book took until about 100 pages in to actually pick up - everything before that is either an extended prologue, or hamfisted character introductions which completely failed to impress any interest or empathy upon me. Conversations would proceed slowly, drawn out - everything was 'exclaimed' or 'cried'.
For the setting, I guess setting it in a sort of alternative Europe and Spain in particular (I think?) is a neat idea but I'm not entirely sure why it was that way at all. I think a new, fictional world would have worked just as well - probably better. As it was, the writing would switch into other languages for some portions, especially character dialogue, for flavour - but it wasn't consistent. A character would be called Condesa one paragraph and Countess/Count the next - Mister and then Maestro. If you're going to use foreign languages and titles, more power to you - just pick one and use that. Another example is the Life-to-Come cult/religion/whatever. Wait, no, Vida-la-Viene. No, Life-to-Come. Switch, switch, switch.
Dinosaurs are worked into a medieval setting in a surprisingly deft way. They don't feel unnatural or out of place, and one of the neat things is that they each have a different name from whatever-osaurus. Parasaurolophus is 'sackbut', due to the trumpeting noises it makes sounding like an instrument, Deinonynchus are called 'horrors', for obvious reasons. However the author seems to forget his fictional names for the dinosaurs occasionally, I spotted at least two instances of him calling a Corythosaurus (a 'morion') a sackbut, or vice versa. Not major, but a bit sloppy nevertheless. Also a couple of inaccuracies, as far as you can be inaccurate about something we don't know much for certain about - saying that hadrosaurs would walk on their hind legs and gallop on all fours? Please. You try galloping with those stumpy front legs. They'd sprint on their hind legs if anything, using the momentum to keep themselves from falling forwards. Anyway, I digress.
The writing fluctuates between passable and cringeworthy. Particularly one particular sex scene (thankfully the only one I read in my time with the book) which had all the subtlety and wit of two teenagers cybering.
"Strong, long-fingered hands molded her buttocks as if he were a blind artist and meant to sculpt them"
This is the kind of shit I wrote when I was in Year 9, bad harlequin romance crap. Speaking of crap, on p. 63;
"Lupe scowled, which her single brow equipped her well to do."
...and on p. 162;
"Lupe scowled. Her single heavy brow equipped her well to do so."
Not going into how clumsy those sentences are in isolation, using the same description for a character - down to the wording - 100 pages apart? This is rookie stuff.
And the plot? Well it couldn't hold my interest after 280~ pages, and it showed no signs of picking up in the near future. The characters are bland and uninteresting, the plot is kept apparently intentionally vague and mysteeeeerious, unless literally "Go to this place and train some men" and "Go to this place and kill some men, also your girlfriend is cross with you for killing those men" was the plot. In which case, what a waste of my time.
I've given it 2 stars rather than 1 because honestly I could probably have dragged myself through the rest of the pages, so it wasn't completely awful. It's just, [b:Seveneves|25202313|Seveneves|Neal Stephenson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1427127116s/25202313.jpg|42299347] got here and why bother reading this tripe when I could be reading that?
I thought this was going to be a lot better, but it was okay. I'm not sure if I will continue with the series, but maybe I can be convinced...?
I was just kind of... bored. It's surprising, because this book had tons of things in it that I tend to love (high fantasy, medieval feel, battle scenes, court intrigue, politics, conspiracies and plotting...). For one, the characters felt pretty undeveloped for the most part. I read this entire book and didn't feel like I knew the characters well or cared about them? The worldbuilding was pretty cool, but of course I wanted more (true to form).
I thought it was really cool that dinosaurs were part of normal life in this book, like horses, and I want to know more about them! Each chapter also included little snippets about dinosaur species and other worldbuilding things, which was awesome. That's pretty much what pushed this to a 3 star rating for me. If I rated this purely on enjoyment level, I'd give it 2 stars because I was bored and struggled to care about it.
I was just kind of... bored. It's surprising, because this book had tons of things in it that I tend to love (high fantasy, medieval feel, battle scenes, court intrigue, politics, conspiracies and plotting...). For one, the characters felt pretty undeveloped for the most part. I read this entire book and didn't feel like I knew the characters well or cared about them? The worldbuilding was pretty cool, but of course I wanted more (true to form).
I thought it was really cool that dinosaurs were part of normal life in this book, like horses, and I want to know more about them! Each chapter also included little snippets about dinosaur species and other worldbuilding things, which was awesome. That's pretty much what pushed this to a 3 star rating for me. If I rated this purely on enjoyment level, I'd give it 2 stars because I was bored and struggled to care about it.
Man alive, this was TERRIBLE. It wasn't the premise, just the writing. I gave up about fifty pages into it.
Esperaba más dinosaurios. No MUCHOS dinosaurios, sino más. El inicio de la novela es una enorme batalla entre dos ejércitos de saurios, caballeros y guerreros. A partir de ahí, la novela se convierte en una intriga palaciega que, lejos de se aburrida, me ha gustado mucho. El caso es que yo esperaba dinosaurios en un libro que se llama The Dinosaur Lords.
El libro está bien, es entretenido, pero el factor que hizo que me pusiera a leerlo prácticamente desaparece y se queda como mero decorado. Si os gustan las novelas de fantasía épica con tramas políticas complicadas y con cliffhangers interesantes, esta novela os va a encantar. Si venís buscando dinosaurios, leed las primeras 100 y ya. Como negativo, señalar que había un personaje femenino que apuntaba maneras y acaba relegado por los otros dos protagonistas.
Leeré el segundo, a ver si Victor Milán enmienda todos estos errores.
El libro está bien, es entretenido, pero el factor que hizo que me pusiera a leerlo prácticamente desaparece y se queda como mero decorado. Si os gustan las novelas de fantasía épica con tramas políticas complicadas y con cliffhangers interesantes, esta novela os va a encantar. Si venís buscando dinosaurios, leed las primeras 100 y ya. Como negativo, señalar que había un personaje femenino que apuntaba maneras y acaba relegado por los otros dos protagonistas.
Leeré el segundo, a ver si Victor Milán enmienda todos estos errores.
Fact is: I am very picky with fantasy novels and I was probably one of the few people who never was much into dinosaurs, so in theory such a premise shouldn't have piqued me, but knowing [a:Victor Milán|4601681|Victor Milán|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1422563171p2/4601681.jpg]'s work from his short Wild Cards stories (and his Wild Cards single book) and having thoroughly enjoyed it, I figured I could try these books out and man, was I not disappointed. (I am writing this after finishing all three books so it's colored by having read the next two.)
First, the only negative factor one could say about this first book is that it maybe takes a bit to find its footing because of the obvious need to plant the worldbuilding and introduce the characters and there's a lot of politics talk that might be a bit hit and miss, but that's a given for any fantasy book of this scope and size so it was a necessary price to pay that anyway paid off in the second half when things started going underway.
On the positives: I actually am in awe of the amount of work that must have gone into these series and (I'll probably say more on that in the reviews for the next two since they expanded on most things I liked about it) I absolutely dig this re-imagined Medieval Europe - I like how you can recognize exactly who is who and what historical events might be referenced, but it's all done very freshly and with a lot of room for surprising a reader. (Also, as an Italian, I am absolutely delighted that one of the characters who comes from this-world-Italy has a law degree given that we had one of the first law universities in the world during the Middle Ages... but I digress.)
As for the characters, they *all* get better in the next installments (which is why this one has only three stars), but what I had here was more than enough to keep me hooked - the main four (Rob - who's most likely my favorite out of all the cast-, Karyl, Jaume and Melodìa) are all solid characters whose storylines I thoroughly enjoyed and whose evolutions I found very well-penned (I especially enjoyed Rob and Karyl's adventures admittedly, but I definitely dug Jaume's background and Melodia's development), while the minor characters cast was also very well-conceived and written (admittedly most of my minor faves are in between Jaume's Companions) and the antagonists were also all fairly interesting, even if again, they all got better in the next installments as well. From the character work point of view, I found everyone very engaging.
Ah, and of course it definitely delivers when it comes to the dinosaurs. As stated, I'm no dinosaur nerd so a lot of that got lost on me I'm afraid, but I definitely learned a lot, I really liked how the dinosaurs aren't just there for show but are full part of this world up to language choices and these books definitely got me at least interested in the aforementioned dinosaurs when Jurassic Park couldn't back in the day. Ah, and Milán can definitely write his battle scenes. He writes really great battle scenes. If everything you asked of this book (without going into worldbuilding, diversity in the cast and so on) is knights fighting on dinosaurs you're getting that in spades, but it's really more than just knights on dinosaurs.
All in all, I greatly enjoyed this first installment - it does suffer a bit from the problems most first installments of huge series have namely that it takes a while for the story to kick in fully, but the next two books more than amply make up for it and it's definitely a good start to a really enjoyable triad.
Also
[SPOILER for the ending]
I am ABSOLUTELY intrigued by how Milán has decided to work in the theological part of this universe - there's enough of fairly known figures and mythological elements (archangels? apocalypses? Aphrodite? Faeries?) but they're so different that you can't know exactly where this entire thing is going and I absolutely couldn't wait to find out until I got to the next two installments. No spoilers, but I was not disappointed.
First, the only negative factor one could say about this first book is that it maybe takes a bit to find its footing because of the obvious need to plant the worldbuilding and introduce the characters and there's a lot of politics talk that might be a bit hit and miss, but that's a given for any fantasy book of this scope and size so it was a necessary price to pay that anyway paid off in the second half when things started going underway.
On the positives: I actually am in awe of the amount of work that must have gone into these series and (I'll probably say more on that in the reviews for the next two since they expanded on most things I liked about it) I absolutely dig this re-imagined Medieval Europe - I like how you can recognize exactly who is who and what historical events might be referenced, but it's all done very freshly and with a lot of room for surprising a reader. (Also, as an Italian, I am absolutely delighted that one of the characters who comes from this-world-Italy has a law degree given that we had one of the first law universities in the world during the Middle Ages... but I digress.)
As for the characters, they *all* get better in the next installments (which is why this one has only three stars), but what I had here was more than enough to keep me hooked - the main four (Rob - who's most likely my favorite out of all the cast-, Karyl, Jaume and Melodìa) are all solid characters whose storylines I thoroughly enjoyed and whose evolutions I found very well-penned (I especially enjoyed Rob and Karyl's adventures admittedly, but I definitely dug Jaume's background and Melodia's development), while the minor characters cast was also very well-conceived and written (admittedly most of my minor faves are in between Jaume's Companions) and the antagonists were also all fairly interesting, even if again, they all got better in the next installments as well. From the character work point of view, I found everyone very engaging.
Ah, and of course it definitely delivers when it comes to the dinosaurs. As stated, I'm no dinosaur nerd so a lot of that got lost on me I'm afraid, but I definitely learned a lot, I really liked how the dinosaurs aren't just there for show but are full part of this world up to language choices and these books definitely got me at least interested in the aforementioned dinosaurs when Jurassic Park couldn't back in the day. Ah, and Milán can definitely write his battle scenes. He writes really great battle scenes. If everything you asked of this book (without going into worldbuilding, diversity in the cast and so on) is knights fighting on dinosaurs you're getting that in spades, but it's really more than just knights on dinosaurs.
All in all, I greatly enjoyed this first installment - it does suffer a bit from the problems most first installments of huge series have namely that it takes a while for the story to kick in fully, but the next two books more than amply make up for it and it's definitely a good start to a really enjoyable triad.
Also
[SPOILER for the ending]
I am ABSOLUTELY intrigued by how Milán has decided to work in the theological part of this universe - there's enough of fairly known figures and mythological elements (archangels? apocalypses? Aphrodite? Faeries?) but they're so different that you can't know exactly where this entire thing is going and I absolutely couldn't wait to find out until I got to the next two installments. No spoilers, but I was not disappointed.