Queen of Dragons
a book by Shana Abe
Author’s Site | Amazon
Overall Rating: 6/10
Meets Expectations: -2
Apparent Rating: 4/10
Perhaps I have strange expectations, but I tend to think books in series should get better. With more familiarity to the world the author has set up, the reader is free to concentrate on the increased attention to characterization and plot. Frequently books in a series actually decline in readability. That was the case with Abe’s “Drakon” books.
I read The Smoke Thief and The Dream Thief and thought they were tolerable if you like those Victorian-set rape-romances where because women have no rights, the man insists and marries her in some pretty ceremony then he doesn’t need her consent anymore. The dragon and shapechanging aspects of this particular world were interesting and they seemed to give the women some inherent power they would otherwise lack. But power in and of itself seemed to cause their confinement because the strongest female Drakon would be mated to the strongest male Drakon. I have zero understanding of this kind of civilization. I have zero understanding as to why women would endure it. But I find it really repulsive that some woman would write about this as a form of erotica.
With that background, it doesn’t shock anyone that I did not particularly enjoy Queen of Dragons. In this book, a female who is the de facto head of the Slavic Drakon (though women can’t lead there either) decides to leave for some random reason and goes to the English Drakon, who proceed to strip her of her rights and powers and demand she mate with their leader who is merely a figurehead while the council does all the real decision-making. She keeps insisting that she’s a king just like he is. She keeps insisting that she’s better than a mere woman. But she lets herself be captured so the man can save her.
There is some unexplained funny business with sleep “flying” that never gets explained. There’s some plot with spies and evil humans, but we don’t see it and it’s never explained. It really seems like “These are some things with plot. I’m going to mention them so you know this could be a real book, but instead I concentrated on the romance angle.” But the sex scenes are also vague and I did not see any sort of romance. The Drakon figure-head likes her because she keeps trying to get away and he gains some minimal respect for her abilities but mostly he knows his life will go easier if he does what the council wants him to do. That didn’t seem very romantic to me.
If I lived in a world with Victorian expectations, I would be lifting weights, taking martial arts, practicing with weaponry, and conditioning my body so I could fight. If I could shapeshift into a dragon, I doubt I would put up with being stripped of my rights. I found that I had no respect for this supposedly powerful dragon-woman because she did nothing with her power to save herself and she did nothing to help anyone else who was being abused by the situation.
Americans seem to be rather appalled by Muslim women who wear veils, I hear people saying that women shouldn’t let themselves be degraded by society’s expectations that women are inferior. But we are not so far from that, though apparently far enough that books celebrating the English oppression of women are best-selling hardcovers.
I will not be reading another of these. The writing was tolerable, the story is typical “romance” quality, the “erotic” parts were about as well done as other popular books of the genre. The shapeshifting parts were okay. There is obviously a lot of research done into an historical era. The book isn’t bad per se, I just find its celebration of the oppression of women to be anathema.
