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The Dragon Isles: abandoned home of the good dragons, land of amazing adventure and legendary treasure. The trouble is, no one knows how to get there. Now Mikal Vardan and his crew have found the hidden route, but they’re not the only ones interested in the isles. A beautiful sea elf scavenger thinks the wealth of a lost civilization might be worth killing for, and a menacing sea dragon is determined to bring a reign of terror to the peaceful archipelago. |
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As far as fantasy novels are concerned this one was pretty average, which makes it one of the better DragonLance novels unfortunately. The story was mildly interesting. The main characters are on a quest to collect treasure from the Dragon Isles which is protected by a magical barrier. There is an evil Sea Dragon who plans on using them to get past the barrier and kill all of the inhabitants in the Isles. I thought the use of the sea dragon was pretty weak. It was made abundantly clear that not only was this sea dragon not one of the dragon overlords but was also much more massive than the bronze and brass dragons. The sea dragon of course could walk on land and of course the bronze and brass dragons can move about undersea very quickly. Shimmer who we find out is a bronze dragon actually comments on how the air and the water are naturally easy for a dragon to move through. It makes me wonder what's the point of distinguishing between the land and sea dragons. So anyways, the good guys who prove to be amazingly competent at getting out of situations where they should of died a million times over don't realize that their treasure hunt will cause the barrier to fail until the very end. At which point EVERYONE seems to become completely clairvoyant and somehow manage to understand everything about the barrier system even though they just saw it for the first time. This HUMONGOUS sea dragon of course gets through the barrier and tries to destroy it completely leading to a final fight between the good guys and the evil dragon. A fight which will involve a lot of people climbing up a huge flight of stairs and falling down the stairs and climbing up once more. Miraculously the main character a ship captain manages to get his hands on a Coral Lance which apparently is similar enough in power to a DragonLance and mounts the Bronze Dragon with a crippled wing and no harness and charges the Sea Dragon. While anyone who reads the original chronicles knows that it took a bunch of knights with footman lances to kill just one blue dragon and that was because the dragon was hypnotized anyways. I'd be surprised if this coral lance even manage to extend past the bronze dragon's head unless the rider was sitting on his head. All in all don't expect something exceptional. The writing is a bit better than the typical mass produce fantasy novels but if you don't read it, it's not a big loss.
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