Book Review: A Knight of the Dragon Academy parts 1:3

"A Knight of the Dragon Academy 3" by Michael Dalton and Eliza Hawk was published last week.

As the title suggests, the third part in a series: the authors have finished pretty much all the initial storylines so they could leave it as a trilogy but have also left open the possibility of developing the series further.

Lnks to the amazon pages to order these stories

A Knight of the Dragon Academy eBook : Dalton, Michael, Hawk, Eliza: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

A Knight of the Dragon Academy 2 eBook : Dalton, Michael, Hawk, Eliza: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

A Knight of the Dragon Academy 3 eBook : Dalton, Michael, Hawk, Eliza: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store


Author Michael Dalton described this series as "Pern by means of the Medicis"

It does indeed have distinct echoes of Anne McCaffrey's "Pern" series except set in a society more like Renaissance-era Venice and Italy in an age of religion and a world of fantasy rather than being set in the future on an alien planet many light years from earth. 

This series of novels has elements of what C.S. Lewis used to call a "Bildungsroman" (a coming of age story) in which the central characters aspire to become dragon-riding knights, which they achieve by lifting a curse from the dragon characters and thereby restoring their intelligence and moral conscience.

The stories are mostly set in a realm called Avilus, ruled by powerful families not unlike the powerful merchant families of Italy and Venice at the time of the High Renaissance on earth. This land was part of Umira, a continent or world where there are two intelligent species - humans and dragons.

About a thousand years before this story, Avilus was at the centre of a rich and powerful empire known tohistorians as the Avilan Empire, which ruled most of Umira nd was at peace with the dragons. But then a small group of dragons who had become fascinated by human warfare decided to join a group of barbarian tribes who had been in conflict with the Empire.

While the majority of dragons spent decades deciding whether to intervene, the support of this small group of dragons made the barbarian tribes almost invincible and the Avilan Empire began to come apart under their attacks. When the barbarians were about to sack the capital, Avilus, an event called "The Cataclysm" took place, robbing all dragons of their sentience.

Nobody at the time of the books knew exactly what had happened but it was suggested that the curse might have been cast by a desperate wizard or patriarch with the intention of saving the city by taking away the intelligence of the dragons who were attacking it, but instead the curse took the mind of every dragon on Umira. Every part of Avilus was devastated as the dragons became like wild beasts.

Some years, decades or centuries later a priest called Athanasius managed to devise a ritual which could free a dragon from the curse. Unfortunately doing this is extremely dangerous as the curse can only lifted from one dragon at a time and it has to be done in person and in the presence of the dragon. If a human attempts the ritual and succeeds, the dragon is cured and returns to sentience and forms a lifelong telepathic bond with the Person who cured him or her (very similar to the bond formed when a dragon-rider impresses a newly hatched dragon in Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels.) If the attempt fails the humans involved usually end up dead.

Athanasius managed to cure a dragon, and teach others to do so, and they founded the Dragon Academy - think Hogwarts for dragon riders and you will have a pretty good idea.

For centuries the Dragon Academy has sent out teams of two to find and cure cursed dragons, each team consisting of a Seeker, who will try to cure a dragon, and a squire (think apprentice) who will assist him or her. If they succeed the seeker becomes a Dragon knight, while the squire returns to the academy and after a further hundred days of training, becomes in turn a seeker, picks his or her squire, and the two go forth in search of a new cursed dragon to cure.

At the start of the first book the central character, Roland son of Bjorn, is the squire to a seeker named Heinrich: their search for a dragon had been successful and they are about to attempt the dangerous task of entering the dragon's den to effect a cure.

But if they survive it Roland will have to face the even more dangerous task of staying alive when the heads of rival Great Families take an interest in him ...

Well written, entertaining, and an eternal triangle in  the first book becomes an unconventional romance in the second and third.

Michael Dalton has a habit of including "Easter egg" level, and occasionally cameos and full-blown crossovers, where characters from one of his series of books appear n others. However, there is none of that this time as these three books are set on a completely different world from any of his other work.

We enjoyed reading Michael Dalton's books and this is one of his better ones. I am not privy to how much of  this was written by each of the two authors but certainly have the impression that Eliza Hawk has added something to the project. In particular the female characters seem a bit more real, better developed. and less impossibly perfect than those in some of Dalton's other books.

We can recommend this series.


 Mitth'raw'nuruodo




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