Assassin's Apprentice
Dragon Haven is the second book in the Rain Wilds Chronicles, which is the fourth of five mini-series that make up the Realm of the Elderlings. This book picks up right where Dragon Keeper left off, with our band of misfit Keepers and their associated dragons, a couple of hunters, Alise and Sedric who are from Bingtown and doing research, and the crew of the liveship Tarman. They're trying to find the legendary city of Kelsingra. But there's a rogue wave and it separates our group and we spend the first third of the book trying to reunite and deal with the fallout. Then we spend endless days of grooming dragons, hunting and foraging, and dealing with interpersonal relationships. It's an exhausting, grueling journey, and that certainly shows in the endless pages of travel.
Meanwhile, the dragons are getting stronger and healthier. Some of the Keepers are changing, too. They are developing scales and other dragon-like characteristics and we learn that this is part of changing humans into Elderlings to be long-term companions to dragons. We also learn more about the secrets of Tarman and why he can travel in much shallower waters than other ships, watch as Alise and Sedric become further and further away from their Bingtown roots and connections. We also learn that young people are always ready for sexual action.
I'm so mixed on this book. Robb is known for her slow builds, so I'm not surprised that we're halfway through this quartet of books and we're just now making some headway. I guess I'm a bit surprised that the characters are so meh to me. Don't get me wrong, Robb's characters are great. Thymara, Alise, Sedric, Sintara, and, to a lesser extent, Leftrin, are all interesting and complicated characters. They do dumb things because they aren't perfect. They frequently make me angry because they honestly just don't the things I would do. Robb does create believable, complex characters. She develops characters in lieu of developing plot and I am 100% on board for that.
But there's too many characters here. We've got more than a dozen dragons, a dozen Keepers, we've got half a dozen people on the crew, and we've got Alise and Sedric. Plus, there's a side story in which two birdkeepers from Bingtown and Trehaug correspond back and forth. There's just too much. There's no one character to get invested in and so I just don't really care about the outcome for any one of them, with the exception of a Keeper and a dragon who honestly don't play a huge role in most of the novel.
So, the characters are well done, but not that exciting to me. There's remarkably little plot development. That does not explain why I spent an entire workday trying to read a page here or there between meetings. Robb's magical writing makes me want to keep reading and keep reading and keep reading. I want to see more of her world. I want to know more about its mysteries. I want to find out if the dragons ever learn to fly. I want all this and I don't know why I want all this except to say that Robb is a genius.
I immediately put the next book on hold at the library, of course.
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