Year of Epic Fantasy Reading 2017: Day 20 (The White Dragon)

Title: The White Dragon
Author: Anne McCaffrey
Themes: Entitlement
Quotes: "So...the boy had discovered that flying a firebreathing dragon was not enough to keep him content with his life."
Reading/Listening Time: 13 hours, 6 minutes

Review:

I found this book while looking for another one that I'd bought a while back and lost. All I could remember about it is that had a white dragon on the cover. That book ended up being "Swords of the Six" by Scott Appleton. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but I can't imagine it being dumber than this one.

The dragons in it are basically a glorified cleaning crew, they're not particularly intelligent but for some reason they're just so majestic that the main character becomes sexually aroused by watching them mate.

The humans are not a whole lot better. I really had a hard time caring about Jaxom because I think he's kind of creepy. He makes me think of this guy:

He's childish and entitled, and if for some reason he doesn't get what he wants he just takes it and eventually everyone comes round to congratulate him for taking initiative.

I would have really loved it if we saw Jaxom start to become this really horrible villain, and he was so powerful because he was willing to be ruthless and just take what he wants. This story admires those qualities though. It reads like it was written in at the height of the British Empire: people rule the world by acting like it already belongs to them. There are aspects of that mentality that I think are worthy of recognition and investigation, but this book doesn't even do that. It just assumes that we're gonna somehow relate to this awful person just by virtue of him being the main character.

It's a really bland story with horrible characters and it uses dragons, the one thing that could be really cool about it, like they're just cool looking dogs...

(I almost feel bad comparing them to dogs, because dogs are generally more endearing and less creepy. But maybe that would be different if we could read their minds.)

I was not overly impressed.

Rating: 2/5 Stars.