1 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
Becoming the Dragon by Alex Sapegin is a novel that follows the story of a boy named Andy as he changes from being a human to being a full-fledged dragon with two hearts, scales, and wings. Andy travels from his normal home to his dragon village and new family.
This story is creative, but the execution is very flawed. For starters, I could not even understand what was occurring for the first 60% of the novel. It seemed as if it was from multiple points of view, but the story constantly jumped from character to character without truly developing a single one. I could not keep track of who was who because not enough time was spent developing the characters, and as new characters were added on, I simply became even more lost. I will not even try to summarize it because I can’t remember a coherent thing. I think that Sapegin was trying to give some backstory to the world while simultaneously forming Andy’s story, but the split between backstory and main plot was not made clear.
Andy did not start changing into the dragon until the 60% mark. The transformation then takes up another 15 to 20% of the novel, and then another 10% was his grueling training. From the book’s synopsis, it seemed as if the first 15-20% of the novel would be him transforming and then the rest of the novel would be training. Instead, the beginning is filled with some sort of side plot, almost like a prequel, 20% was him “Becoming the Dragon”, and then 10% was him training as the dragon. As Andy changes, it is italicized which parts are of him speaking, and then non-italicized when others speak or when backstory is being explained. Even though the backstory was still randomly placed throughout the novel, it was a little easier to understand who was speaking. I started to wonder why this hadn’t been done from the beginning.
In the last 10% of the novel, a completely NEW side plot is added to the story, with romance. It’s almost as if the book decided to have a plot in the last 100-200 pages. Nevertheless, it is not any less confusing. With the new side plot, the italics disappear, and the random point-of-view switches start up again. At this point, I just wanted to finish the book.
There were not that many grammar errors that I noticed. Sometimes when a character spoke, it wasn’t necessarily grammatically incorrect, but just grammatically confusing. Nevertheless, there seemed to be formatting errors with the chapters. As I read this on both my phone and Kindle Cloud Reader (PC), chapters seemed to start in the middle of the page. Sometimes, they also had character names at the top. The names may have supposed to indicate which characters the chapter would be speaking about, or which characters would be “telling” the chapter from their point of view. However, this did not help me much simply because the characters were so forgettable that even if their names were given I would not know how they were important to the main storyline.
There was worldbuilding, but it was done in an “information dump” style. Randomly in the middle of a scene, a supposedly important blurb of backstory would be given. This would not help me to remember the history of the world at all, because my mind would still be focused on the “main” scene. Also, when Andy traveled to different locations, the rare descriptions of them were barely fleshed out.
I gave this book 1 out of 4 stars. I could not enjoy any of the scenes of the novel because there was little to no character development and then the point of view jumped around constantly. If I already can’t tell the characters apart because they aren’t really unique, how am I supposed to understand who is speaking at what time, or remember who is important to the main plot? The story almost finished on an okay note, but then the addition of the random new plot and the abrupt ending basically said “pick up book 2 to find out what happens next.” Overall, I could not recommend this book to anyone, even lovers of fantasy novels.
******
Becoming the Dragon
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on iTunes | on Smashwords
Like BriennaiJ's review? Post a comment saying so!
. I just wanted to be plain with my review, and I couldn't find anything to really like about it.
