Dragon Thief by Marc Secchia

Dragon Thief by Marc Secchia

(Cover picture courtesy of Amazon.)

Kal was not a thief. He certainly did not intend to steal any dragon’s treasure.

He was an adventurer. Avid art collector. Incurable wealth adjuster and risk-taker. Kal had legendary expertise in the security arrangements of palaces and noble houses the world over. He hankered for remote, craggy mountaintops and the dragon hoards he might find hidden beneath them. Besides, what harm was there in looking? Dragon gold was so … shiny.

Most especially, he was not planning for any treasure to steal him.

That was a little awkward, to say the least.

[Full disclosure: I received a free ebook from the author in exchange for an honest review.]

Dragon Thief starts with our loveable rogue Kal foolishly trying to steal a dragon’s horde and finding a gorgeous, naked woman amongst the treasure.  What’s a rogue to do?  Does he rescue her as well or is this some sort of trap set up by the dragon?  What could a dragon possibly want with some random woman?  Well, as Kal finds out there’s more to the woman than meets the eye because the woman, Tazithiel, is a Shapeshifter.  And although she’s not happy about a thief in her hoard, things take an interesting turn and the two work out a mutually beneficial truce that turns into a friendship, then something more.

Both Kal and Tazithiel have problematic pasts and both have huge trust issues.  Kal has trust issues by virtue of his chosen profession while Tazithiel has a horrific past filled with abuse because of her shapeshifter status.  Yet they come together with a fascinating goal: to find out what’s on the other side of the 25 league tall mountains that encircle the Island World.  Is there a world beyond there containing something other than islands surrounded by poisonous clouds?  What manner of creatures live beyond the Rim-Wall Mountains?  Obviously Kal and Tazi’s journey isn’t as straightforward as they’d like, but they do find answers in an interesting way by the end of the book.

Marc Secchia has brought his trademark painstaking care to world-building once again.  Not only do we learn so much more about various islands and cultures within the Island World, we learn a lot more about dragon lore and the fate of Aranya and the Sylakian Empire.  There are also more technological innovations than we saw in any of the previous books because Dragon Thief takes place 311 years after Aranya, which was the most recent book in the Island World’s long timeline.  I don’t want to give away too much, especially if you’ve read the previous books in the same world, but let’s just say some things have changed tremendously while others will never change.  Especially people/dragons.

While the beginning is a bit slow after Tazithiel decides not to eat Kal on the spot, the beautiful writing style keeps things interesting as the two new lovers work out their issues.  After that, the plot speeds up quite a bit because dragons aren’t exactly the kind of creatures that are welcome everywhere in the Island World.  And once Kal introduces Tazi to some of his friends and associates…let’s just say things get interesting as Tazi discovers a whole difference side of our thief.  Best of all, throughout the book there is Marc Secchia’s trademark humour that had me quite literally laughing out loud at some points.  So while there are some pretty heavy themes in Dragon Thief, it’s not all doom and gloom.

Although there’s no official sequel set, the ending is satisfying yet leaves a little wiggle room if Secchia wants to continue the story of Tazithiel and Kal.  Their actions have some very fascinating implications for our Island World and I can’t wait to see what he does with the new revelation about the Rim-Wall Mountains.

If you haven’t read any of Marc Secchia’s dragon books, Dragon Thief is a great place to start.  It’s funny and touching, fast-paced yet with plenty of character development and there is some incredible world-building going on here.  And if you’re already a fan like I am, Dragon Thief is a great installment in the overall story of the Island World.  It builds on what we’ve seen and learned in previous books and introduces us to both an old friend and a whole new cast of characters to love.  You really can’t ask for more.

I give this book 5/5 stars.

Amazon     Barnes and Noble*     Goodreads      Powell’s**

*Not available until Decmber 12, the release date.

**Not available.

Like all of Marc Secchia’s dragon books, you don’t really need to read this one in a particular order.  However, it does help if you read the books in order of publication because of certain minor spoilers that crop up.  Here’s my current recommended reading order:

  1. Aranya (Shapeshifter Dragons #1)
  2. The Pygmy Dragon (Shapeshifter Dragon Legends #1)
  3. Shadow Dragon (Shapeshifter Dragons #2)
  4. Dragonfriend (Dragonfriend #1)
  5. Dragonlove (Dragonfriend #2)

Like I said, you don’t have to read all of these books before Dragon Thief but they will certainly give you a greater appreciation of all of the mythological references contained within the book.  For example, there are references to the Pygmy Dragon, Hualiama and Aranya.  They’re easy to figure out in the context of the book but again, you’ll have a greater appreciation of just how intertwined Secchia’s various series are and how rich the mythology he’s created is if you do.  With that said, if you’ve read the first two Shapeshifter Dragon books you may want to wait until the third is out because there are some minor spoilers in the references to Aranya throughout the book.  And of course the very existence of dragons is a bit of a spoiler considering how dire Aranya’s situation is at the end of Shadow Dragon.

Lazy Sundays: Winter Sucks

Even though I’ve moved over 400 kilometres (250 miles) south, I find that my new home is much colder.  Which is odd, because you’d think that the further south you live, even if it’s just a couple hundred kilometres, the warmer things would be.  Apparently not.  I find that my new city is colder than it is up north because the wind blows right off the frozen river.  So although the ‘real’ temperature isn’t that low, the windchill quickly makes things unbearable.  At least up north I wasn’t near a river and had trees for shelter.

Or maybe I’m just being more curmudgeony than usual because the windchill has prevented me from going outside much lately.  I’m geting slightly stir-crazy but at the same time I’ve been reading much more than I normally would.  So I guess that’s an upside?

I hope you guys are warmer than I am!  How was your Sunday?

Discussion: Blog Traffic Patterns

One odd thing I’ve noticed over the years is that Mondays are my absolute best traffic days but Fridays are my worst.  This isn’t that odd when you think about it: people love to procrastinate at work on Mondays whereas on Fridays they’re more focused on going out.  But what’s interesting to me is what happens when there’s a holiday in North America (primarily in the United States): traffic goes down.

With everyone at home, you’d think my traffic would go up.  Yet the week of American Thanksgiving always finds virtual tumbleweeds blowing across the expanse of my blog.  What gives?  Do people only visit during work hours to procrastinate or when it’s a holiday do more people spend time with their families instead of on the internet?  It’s an interesting question and I wonder if it’s the same for a lot of other blogs or even larger websites.

Well, what do you guys think?  If you’re a blogger, do you have this happen as well?

I’m Moving to WordPress.org (Soon)!

I hinted at it several months ago and I’ve had the idea in my head for about a year but I’ve finally made a firm decision: I am moving from the free wordpress.com over to the paid wordpress.org.  Obviously I’m not moving over right this very second but I want to start the transition on the afternoon of December 21st and be fully done by January 1st, in time to launch my 2016 reading and reviewing challenge.  I’m hoping to migrate over all of my followers as well as pay for a link redirect so that anyone still coming back here gets directed to my new site.  We’ll see how things go.  They should go reasonably well as I’ll be paying for a guided transfer rather than mucking through the whole thing on my own.  My archives are too vast to even attempt that with my level of technological know-how (or lack thereof).

So stick around because there are going to be some great changes coming this way!  I hope to see you all over on my official website in a month or so.

Symbiont by Mira Grant

Symbiont by Mira Grant

(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

THE ENEMY IS INSIDE US.

The SymboGen designed tapeworms were created to relieve humanity of disease and sickness. But the implants in the majority of the world’s population began attacking their hosts turning them into a ravenous horde.

Now those who do not appear to be afflicted are being gathered for quarantine as panic spreads, but Sal and her companions must discover how the tapeworms are taking over their hosts, what their eventual goal is, and how they can be stopped.

Parasitology was originally meant to be a duology, not a trilogy but in the end I don’t think Mira Grant could have fit all of this into two books.  Yes, some people will probably complain this is just a bridge to the last exciting installment but there is a lot of important stuff going on here.  And despite all of the information that is thrown at us (perhaps because of it), Symbiont is a thrilling page-turner.

At the end of the last book, we found out a very interesting fact about Sal: she’s a parasite, just like Adam and Tansy.  Sally Mitchell died the moment her brain was damaged in the crash; Sal the parasite took over her brain and gained control of her body.  This revelation has some fascinating implications, some of which I can’t go into because of spoilers but the most interesting one had to do with her relationships.  How does Nathan feel now that he knows he’s dating a parasite?  He takes things surprisingly well because the parasites who have managed to integrate properly with the human brain are surprisingly human.  They have social issues like Tansy’s propensity for death threats and Sal’s use of slang but they’re self-aware, they have emotions and they have a very similar survivor instinct.  The really troubling thing rising from this revelation is what about the sleepwalkers, the zombie-like creatures who are just humans whose parasites took over the brain?  I don’t want to spoil too much but let’s just say there’s a key thing that separates parasites like Sal from those in the sleepwalkers.

Sal is really growing as a character.  Of course she’s not a kick-butt badass like you would expect the main character in a virtual zombie apocalypse to be, but she’s not a wimp.  Sal goes through a lot in this book and she comes out the other end stronger.  She’s far from perfect but she does learn to be more self-reliant and self-sufficient.  For the first time since we’ve met her, she ends up being alone for an extended stretch of time and it’s very interesting to see what she does when faced with a horrible situation.  At the same time, we learn a lot more about the secondary characters like Dr. Cale and Dr. Steven Banks, the head of SymboGen and the man who has essentially caused this entire sleepwalker mess.  None of the secondary characters are what they pretend to be, especially one character I won’t name who was one of Sal’s friends.

With the global situation spiralling out of control as more and more SymboGen parasites become self-aware, you’d think that Symbiont would be a never-ending series of depressing events, each worse than the last.  While that’s certainly true at first, you at least get hints that there might be hope out there despite the different factions competing over the fate of the human race.  There’s SymboGen, who wants to make a profit out of this by modifying the sleepwalker parasites.  Then there’s Dr. Cale, whose motivations remain unclear.  And finally there’s that unnamed secondary character who wants the total destruction of the human race as we know it.  Sal and Nathan are stuck between a rock and a hard place and sometimes it seems like there’s no real ‘right’ or ‘good’ side.  But they’re not going to let the human race go down without a fight.  It will be interesting to see how Mira Grant decides to resolve the situation in the third book, Chimera.  Although we have a lot of our questions about parasites answered here in Symbiont, there are some very critical questions left open by the end of the book.

So here we have a second book that’s not only exciting, but satisfying in terms of answering questions readers have while posing new questions for the third book.  Sal has grown immensely as a character and Mira Grant’s end of the world scenario is terrifyingly plausible and realistic.  With great characters, plenty of excitement and some amazing world-building, you can’t go wrong with a Mira Grant novel.  I can’t wait to read Chimera.

I give this book 5/5 stars.

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