Mistress of Dragons (The Dragonvarld, Book 1)

I picked it up on a whim, having enjoyed some of Weis' collaborations with Tracy Hickman. It seems that alone, her talent simply evaporates, and Tor is perfectly willing to publish bad lemony fanfiction. At best, it's good for making fun of with friends.

Maybe this kind of plot was enough when Dragonlance began in 1984, but the ensuing decades have seen the market flooded with real brilliance, along with these generic fantasy trilogies with dragons on the cover cranked out every month. Good writing, characters, and original twists could easily overcome that disadvantage, but instead we got cardboard cutouts and a plot that mostly exists to fill pages between sex scenes. Melisande is a self-absorbed twit utterly dependant on her lover. Draconas is an arrogant human/dragon prick who endlessly whines about the puny humans and isn't nearly as intelligent as he believes, and we know he believes it, because we're privy to his banal stream of consciousness throughout. (Except, conveniently, only when it would reveal some vital twist too early!) Plus when the King comes on the scene, we get a second angsty whiner with a superiority complex! Two for the price of one, now that's a deal.

The plot sucks in a way that would make a hentai game proud. Beginning in an apparently all-lesbian convent that has an all-female military and almost zero contact with the outside world, except for monthly choosing a few noble men to mate with a few of the women. A huge deal is made of virgins, even though they take female lovers. For the most part, absolutely nothing happens in the convent, and it takes whole chapters of sex and slice of life to get that across. Then we get Draconas, and he goes to great lengths to make sure that we never have any damn clue what he's doing, where he's going, why he's doing it, or why we should care about his whiny emo ass. The entire first half of the book drifts in an interminable morass. Most of the underpinnings of the story are just plot devices and unimaginative or garbled clichés strung together, especially the dragon's history.

I don't think one creature in this book has a last name or nickname. You don't realize how unnatural it is until you hear someone called the exact same tongue-twisting name constantly.

But oh, the writing puts every other factor to shame. Weis appears to be channeling Robert Jordan in her ability to describe to death pointless details, drag out long and pointless conversations, and gloss over relevant details that might aid with actually understanding the stupid plot. Then our suspension of disbelief is badly challenged by her insistence on pastiching a story out of wildly improbable coincidences, continuity holes, plot devices, infodumps, and eye-rolling backstories. Foreshadowing is in overdose; I constructed a fairly accurate guess of the story arc within the first few chapters. Everyone talks as if they're brain-damaged, repeating themselves or forgetting what was just said.

It does start to get better after 200 pages, but remains intensely mediocre and it's impossible not to start skimming much of it.

Don't get it. I do not recommend except for the humor value inherent in really bad teen fiction. I've seen choose-your-own-adventure(tm) books written better.