The Dragon Republic

This book was so unabashedly bad that it’s not even worth the effort to give it an in depth, point by point review. I’m not going to touch on the pacing (it was bad), or the story (it was bad), or the worst case of middle book syndrome I have ever seen. I have wasted enough time finishing this book, I’m not going to waste any more.

But the one thing I will discuss at length is the element of this book (and the previous one, frankly) that I thought was weakest, and unfortunately the most prominent throughout. Every single character in this book is terrible. In every sense. They are all obviously bad people with very few redeeming qualities. When they aren’t completely 2 dimensional and bland, they are made to be mean, stupid, reactive, bombastic, and angry with absolutely no reprieve from cover to cover. Every interaction felt like a messed up contest to one-up the last interaction for the worst ways people can treat each other. Even when having a “good time” together, drinking or eating meals, the characters would inexplicably hurl insults at each other and CONSTANTLY fight. I found it to be so tiresome and lacking in creativity.

Writing unlikable characters isn’t a sin, most of my favorite books star unlikable characters. But what I find to be most frustrating is that each and every character was written to be unlikable in the exact same way. Beyond just being bad people, the character writing was just plain awful. I’m talking middle school levels of bad writing. Each character was completely indistinguishable. Every adult, every child, regardless of their status or country of origin, each character had the exact same voice. I guarantee if you compiled every dialogue interaction in this book and removed the names, you would have no idea who was saying what. All you’d have are pages and pages of repetitive insults and vitriol. It did not offend me. It bored the hell out of me. I freely admit toward the end of the book, I’d simply skip the page if dialogue was happening so I could just read the paragraphs that progressed the story. It was so DULL and so POINTLESS. I missed no context by skipping conversations. There was nothing of substance in them that was relevant to the story. Story progression was reserved for the paragraphs where only action took place, and dialogue was only included seemingly to remind the reader how the author excelled at writing the same conversation over and over again. It was boring and a massive waste of time and energy.

I found the first book to be middling at best, and I approached this one with apprehension. But even then, I was shocked with how bad this was compared to the first one. I disliked it so much, I might even hate read the third one. I simply cannot understand how other people enjoyed this even a little bit.

The first book of the series was one of my favorites. The world building, supporting characters, and story are all wonderful. The main problem comes from the main character, who doesn't ever seem to have character growth in any meaningful ways even throughout the second entry. I find myself at times wishing the worst on her solely because she makes the most annoying mistakes out of any main character of any fantasy book I've read, and refuses to mature in any way. And to make matters worse, many of the supporting characters see less and less action within this book or they die (or both). Death is to be expected in a book like this of course, but it can be frustrating when the main character is so annoying that you have few redeemable characters to fall back on. Overall a disappointment compared to the first entry that makes it tough to want to read the next entry.