1 out of 4 stars
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Becoming the Dragon is the first book in a fantasy trilogy written by Russian author Alex Sapegin and translated into English by Elizabeth Kulikov. The story follows sixteen-year-old Andy who, after stumbling into a military experiment, finds himself transported to another world filled with magic, political intrigue, and dragons.
With a strange power derived from being struck by lightning and a talent for archery, Andy is not your ordinary sixteen-year-old boy. Still, even he is not prepared when a military experiment goes awry and he is teleported to the world of Ilanta. Once there, he finds himself in progressively more dire situations. He avoids being eaten by wild predators only to be captured by even more dangerous humans. When Andy is fatally wounded while freeing himself and a dragon from captivity and torture, he has only one chance at survival: become a dragon himself.
Sluggish, poorly plotted, and filled with deeply unlikable characters who exhibit nothing that could reasonably be called character development, this book manages to incorporate every overwrought cliche and tired trope that plagues the fantasy genre.
Andy, our hapless protagonist, does not seem to have a personality. In its place, he has a seemingly endless list of things he is improbably knowledgable about including archery and hand to hand combat. At one point he is able to fall into a trance state to master his magic because he once read a brochure on yoga. Anything that he doesn’t know, he is able to pick up almost immediately. He’s so hyper-competent that it’s a good thing he’s unconscious or in a cage for about half of this book, or the story would have ended rather quickly. He’s knocked unconscious four times within the first 70 pages of this book. I counted. Even still, he manages to kill at least seven grown men and women while in captivity despite having never been in a fight before.
The author seems particularly enthusiastic about his world-building. He demonstrates this by including pages and pages of entirely unnecessary exposition that often has very little or nothing to do with advancing the actual story. He devotes three pages to the composition, range, and relative merits of various kinds of bows; five pages covering the various religions of the world of Ilanta; at least ten pages that go over a history of the world, going back 30,000 years; over a full page describing every detail of the armor being worn by characters we never see again after that scene; and, my personal favorite, an entire paragraph about the effects of switching from a per-head to a capitation tax scheme on the burgeoning artisanal class in the dukedom of Lere.
I kept waiting for something to happen in this book. For any of Andy’s immeasurable skills, or inexplicable gift with magic, to amount to something interesting, or for the large cast of secondary characters that are set up and then discarded, never to be seen again, to coalesce into something resembling a conflict or a plot. Even when something does happen, it’s clearly happening only because the story requires it. Andy exhibits almost no agency at all. He doesn’t act upon the story. Things just happen to him. Even when he finally escaped from captivity, it is because his guards coincidentally forgot to secure him properly at the exact right moment.
On a technical level, there are also some errors that should have been caught by an editor. A paragraph repeats itself identically on the same page. There are inconsistencies between the usage of the single and double quotation mark. Something that is referred to “like this” on one page might be referred to ‘like this’ on the next.
Overall though, I would have to say that my least favorite part of the book was the author’s fixation with the chests of the women in the story.This book devotes time to describing the particulars of the breasts of no less than five separate women. It seems like the description of every woman who is not old or directly related to Andy includes some sort of reference to her “décolletage”.
Because I could find very little that was redeemable about this book, I’m rating this 1 out of 4 stars. I certainly would not recommend it to my friends. I would only recommend it to someone who is more interested in fantasy world-building than story quality, and even then I’m sure I could recommend something better.
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Becoming the Dragon
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