jassmine 's review for:

The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter

3.5

dark emotional sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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Tau admired it and thought Hadith might be right. Life was about balance. Tau decided he'd work on it.
By the next morning he'd forgotten his decision to live a balanced life. Over the next moon cycle he spent every waking span in the practice yards and every night tossing in his bed. He tried to feel guilty about how distant he was with the rest of the men.

Considering this is military epic fantasy build around vengeance, I was never going to love this, so the fact that I was fully invested in it and (mostly) enjoyed it is actually a win. I have a lot of thoughts about this one and not sure how to tackle them all, so... points it is!

1. Tau is an annoying main character. I rooted for him - mainly because he's the only fully fledged character - but if he were beside me, I would have strangled him before the book ended... well, I guess he would have killed me if I tried...

2. About the character work... I don't mean to say it's badly done. Hadith felt like a person, so did Jayyed and surprisingly, I would say that after Tau the best developed character was Kellen Okar. It's not that Winter doesn't pay any attention to his characters, it's just that you can tell that he's planning to kill most of them so he's keeping his distance from them. Don't get me wrong, he's ruthless in killing them off, but I can't say that I was particularly affected... (Confere with The Fifth Season or Saga or A Game of Thrones, I guess...)

3. My main gripe with this book though, is the fact that I'm not sure I agree with it's message. This book is about bettering yourself through hard work, through no rest, insane training, pushing through every boundary.

I mean... Tau ends up training against demons in dimension where time works differently...

And it works. It clearly has some aftereffects, but it's still effective training method. I think that's fantasy. This type of training would end up in a completely physical and mental burnout, pushing yourself too much won't make you better, it will break you. And I'm standing by this.

I get what the author was trying to accomplish by this narrative but it doesn't work for me.

4. Which smoothly gets us to the fact that this whole world is highly eugenistic. There are castes, the nobles are naturally bigger and stronger than the lessers/commons and there is also the fact that you have to have some noble blood so you could be enraged (=magic can be used on you to make you a better warrior). Honestly, it's this last thing that's just... 🤨 Why would you add this worldbuilding trait if you are trying to prove that eugenics are trash? I still hope it's made up....

Where am I going with this? This type of worldbuilding just makes me want to go in and set the whole system on fire! But Tau doesn't care about the system, he just cares about himself and his vengeance. Which is infuriating...

5. Also, only women in this world can be gifted (=have magic) which is why Omechi have queen and supposedly women are higher in hierarchy than men - which is demonstrated by the fact that women are the ones to propose marriage in this world not the other way around.

The whole worldbuilding didn't catch up to this though... there are only men in military even though the whole society is built around the military and so (almost) all of the queen's advisors are men. There are only four women characters in the whole book and only one of them is truly important and even she doesn't have much page time. (Well, I mean, the queen is also important, but we don't really see her until the end.) The sexism in the army is rampant and disgusting honestly - it's minor in comparison to some other comparable books (I mean, epic fantasy written by men), but it doesn't match up here. We get to know that sex work is also a thing in this world, but we don't get to see if it's changed somehow in relation to the worldbuilding...

From all of this, it's pretty clear that women actually don't have much power in this world - which is completely fine. Having a female monarch doesn't have to mean "matriarchy". But the ambivalence in which it is presented here just doesn't work very well for me. The gender segregation actually doesn't make any sense in this type of setting...

Also, you know, gendered magic, I almost never love that! Explain! How does it work! Is it a chromosome thing? 🤨 Where are the intersex people in that case?!

6. In conclusion to some of the things I said, this book doesn't really portray any disabled characters (there is one with chronic cough) and is very strong on worshiping able bodies. There are three fat characters who are all - nobles, bad guys, insignificant and die quickly. The message here clearly is that getting fat in this world is a privilege and done on the expense of others. Which you know... doesn't have to be the case... I mean, fatphobia and ableism in this type of worldbuilding completely makes sense, but the author doesn't comment on it, he propagates it.


I said nothing positive yet, right...? 🙈

I'll try to remedy that!

7. The narration of the audiobook is masterful, I really loved that! Would recommend!
8. The cover art is also really lovely.

9. I really love how Winters juxtaposed some of the things. He sometimes gave us one chapter from different character and for me this was a great choice!

It's important to tell that Tau is construed as unreliable character, we aren't supposed to stand by him on 100% He makes bad decisions, he judges people wrongly. And this was done very well, in my opinion. Especially,

with Kellen Okar. From the first nudges of Jayyed, trying to tell Tau that Kellen isn't evil, to getting into Kellen's head and seeing that he's arrogant, gray character - very much like Tau. Training furiously to get from the shadow of his father

.

10. The sex scene was lovely. It was just a bit idealised, but there was enough of the teenage boy left for it to feel realistic and also... feminist.

To wrap this up... as someone who is not fond of fighting scenes, military fantasy and so on... I could have used a bit more editing here. But then clearly, I'm not the intended audience, because there is ton of people who live for reading this stuff. As you can see above, I had a lot of issues with this book, but most of them were actually minor and almost invisible for a "normal reader".

This book very much feels like a debut, when it's sometimes a bit clumsy in piecing some things together, but it's intriguing nonetheless, so... since the next book is supposed to be more political and there seems to be more cultural clashing coming, I'm intrigued and will be picking up the next book!