Talking to Dragons

Paperback

255 pages

Published March 1st 2003 by Magic Carpet Books (first published 1985)

ISBN: 0152046917 (ISBN13: 9780152046910)

Primary Language: English

Source: Borrowed from a friend

The Blurb (www.goodreads.com)

One day, Daystar's mom, Cimorene, hands him a magic sword and kicks him out of the house. Daystar doesn't know what he is supposed to do with the magic sword, but knowing Cimorene, he's sure it must involve a dragon or two!

The story opens with Daystar living in a cottage on the edge of the Enchanted Forrest with his mother and leading a quiet existence of chopping firewood and lessons. One day, an angry wizard shows up out of nowhere, and his mother melts him. This comes as quite a shock to Daystar, who had no idea his mother knew any magic at all. His confusion deepens when she refuses to talk about it.

The next day, Daystar comes out of his house to find his mother walking out of the Enchanted Forest carrying a sword he’d never seen before. She gives him the sword, and without so much as a tearful goodbye, sends him into the forest with the sword to prove himself.

He immediately gets lost, runs into a talking lizard, a temperamental fire-witch who can’t control her magic, and an underage dragon. They stumble through the forest, eventually meeting faces we know from previous books and are fumbled through the end of the quest.

This is the first book in the series told in the first person, which is jarring. The narrative is jumpy and from the very first there were little things that just didn’t sit well in my head. Daystar learns little bits and pieces about his origin from the people he meets and almost every bit he learns is different from what we know to be true from previous books. In the beginning, Antorell the wizard is referred to not as the son of the Head Wizard, but the son of Zemenar, but in previous books, that was one and same person. That’s just one example of the many instances of what I considered mistakes. Even some of the characters were so far out of character I didn’t think they were the same people.

I was very disappointed in this, the last installment in the series. I was so disappointed in the congruency errors, that when I finished reading the story, I looked up the publishing dates, thinking this one had to have been written years after the first. A long period of time was the only possible reason for so many mistakes. I was surprised to find that the fourth book was written 6 years BEFORE the first three! That would certainly explain all the errors. I really liked this series, but the last was definitely my least favorite of the four.