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A review by lylah
The Dragon Revenant by Katharine Kerr
3.0
These books don’t wow me very much, especially as the series goes on, but I still get in the mood to read them from time to time - I like the setting and the classic fantasy feel a lot, and the Welsh-inspired names and reincarnation plot have always intrigued me.
The beginning of this book was a lot more interesting than the second half; I enjoyed learning about Bardek, which was surprisingly free of stereotypes of a non-dominant culture to this world (I guess the Deverrians are considered barbarians to most places, so the Bardekians may be the dominant culture?). It was a lot of fun to see Jill and Salamander trouping around with their magic show while Rhodry struggled to regain his memories.
The Brotherhood/evil gang plot seems like an overused fantasy trope to me at this point and wasn’t all that riveting; Perryn, under the influence of dark magic, raped Jill repeatedly and ensorcelled her in a previous book and he gets a little too much screen time (and a happy ending) for me; nevertheless, I like that Jill had to choose between her love for Rhodry and studying the dweomer.
I do appreciate that the plot eventually goes back to Nevyn’s need to mentor Jill in the dweomer, but much of this book feels like sidetracking plot points that barely move the characters forward. This series has never had “chapters” but been divided by time and place, and as the reincarnation plot is hardly touched in this book, there are only three or so divisions and much of it felt longer than it had to be because of paragraph breaks indicating new scenes the whole time. I miss the switching back and forth between time periods and incarnations of the characters in the first few books.
The beginning of this book was a lot more interesting than the second half; I enjoyed learning about Bardek, which was surprisingly free of stereotypes of a non-dominant culture to this world (I guess the Deverrians are considered barbarians to most places, so the Bardekians may be the dominant culture?). It was a lot of fun to see Jill and Salamander trouping around with their magic show while Rhodry struggled to regain his memories.
The Brotherhood/evil gang plot seems like an overused fantasy trope to me at this point and wasn’t all that riveting; Perryn, under the influence of dark magic, raped Jill repeatedly and ensorcelled her in a previous book and he gets a little too much screen time (and a happy ending) for me; nevertheless, I like that Jill had to choose between her love for Rhodry and studying the dweomer.
I do appreciate that the plot eventually goes back to Nevyn’s need to mentor Jill in the dweomer, but much of this book feels like sidetracking plot points that barely move the characters forward. This series has never had “chapters” but been divided by time and place, and as the reincarnation plot is hardly touched in this book, there are only three or so divisions and much of it felt longer than it had to be because of paragraph breaks indicating new scenes the whole time. I miss the switching back and forth between time periods and incarnations of the characters in the first few books.