The novel is not your usual teen-targeted swords and love story though; it's more intelligent and mature than that, with all adult characters doing adult things. It's full of anti-heroes and difficult lives and has a distinct lack of chivalry or shining armor. Unfortunately, you need to be an adult to keep from getting bored with it, since there's not much of a compelling plot or many interesting characters to keep you turning the pages. As a teenager this book would have bored me and I would not have finished it.

To the scores.

Dragon's Treasure, by Elizabeth A. Lynn
Plot: 4
Concept: 7
Writing Quality/Flow: 5/7
Characters: 7
Horror: NA
Humor: NA
Fun Factor: 3
Page Turner: 4
Re-readability: 5
Overall: 5

As I said in the intro, this story is only fantasy thanks to the dragon-transforming prince. If not for him it might as well be set in Germany in 1302 BCE, except that everyone speaks English and the living conditions are pastoral and agrarian and there's no slavery or butchering barbarian hordes or deadly plagues or cruel kings or viciously-controlling churches. In fact, as is often the case in fantasy, there's no mention of any religion at all.  Basically it's a rose-tinted historical novel with one magical character. They mention mages and wizards and such, but none are ever seen.

This isn't necessarily good or bad; I'm just letting you know.

I would have liked more fantasy elements in the fantasy, but that's mostly personal preference. What really hurt the book though was the lack of excitement or a real plot. There are three main characters: a young male thief and brigand, his sister who was left behind when he fled his homeland, and the dragon-transforming lord. The book begins with these three in close proximity, then scatters them apart for 200 pages, before they come back together near the end. Unfortunately, the book is way too much about them all doing their own, non-related things. We've got no real reason to want them to get back together, and since it's mostly circumstance that brings them back, rather than any building climax in the story, when it happens there's no real reader excitement or dread or anything.

The novel also isn't sure what style it wants to be in.

The chapters from the female character's point of view are very female in style; there's no action, she's gathering and drying herbs, catching fish for supper, getting to know her farmer neighbors, making medicines to heal their sick daughter, etc. All very minor detail stuff, and not boring or awful, just in that small, female-specific style that I've seen in various books by Anne McCaffrey and Ursula K. LeGuin.

The chapters from the male thief's POV are very different, since there's never any attention paid to the minor details. He's robbing, he's hiding in a cave with his fellow outlaws, he's running from soldiers. Unfortunately, those sections are told in very dry, emotionless writing, even when people are being murdered or raped.

The chapters from the dragonlord's POV are much like the male thief's, except that he's attending royal weddings, meting out justice, hunting, turning into a dragon and flying around, etc. There are two good scenes when he assumes dragon form and blows things up with his fire breath, mostly since he's half mad as a dragon, and there's finally some emotion and passion in the description. Unfortunately those are just two scenes, the second of which is really the only powerful moment in the book.

The plot also tries to be sprawling, in much the way George R R Martin's ongoing Song of Fire and Ice series is, but it never comes together in Dragon's Treasure. We see lots of lords and barons and such, we attend a royal wedding, and we learn lots of names for court people. Unfortunately none of them appear more than once or twice, or do anything of any importance, and are therefore swiftly forgotten. They are just background noise, completely irrelevant to the main plot, and none of them are sketched vividly enough to be memorable anyway. The contrast between this style, and the vast character palette of Martin's series, where everyone is important to the story since they're all scheming and interacting in clever ways, could not be more clear.

If all of this makes the novel sound terrible and boring, it's not. Here what I wrote immediately after finishing it, and even went so far as to add a review to the Amazon.com page.  Something I've very seldom done, despite the 150+ reviews I've written for this site. There is one review there that I've never posted on this site though, if you're unaccountably dying to see what I think of my headphones.

It was probably undeserved, but my first thought upon finishing the novel was, "What a stupid fucking book!"

That doesn't sound very promising, but in a way it's a good comment. If the novel had truly sucked, I wouldn't have had any strong reaction, since I would not have cared one way or the other (and probably wouldn't even have finished it). Dragon's Treasure isn't a good story, but it had enough promise that it could have been good, and I wanted it to be good, or at least better than it was. As it stands Dragon's Treasure is basically a very long and well-polished collection of notes about characters, character types, and a land that a good story or series could be set in. It's not a serviceable novel in of itself since there's simply no plot, building conflict, climax, or resolution.

We meet a lot of characters; some interesting and others forgettable. We read about a number of events; some fascinate us, most leave us indifferent. We see lots of plot elements, some clever, most un-involving. On the whole though, it's just 325 pages of scenes populated by average characters, doing average things, with no larger theme or goal to hold it together. If you asked me what the book's main plot was, or central theme, or the message a reader was to take from it, I couldn't answer the question. It's not about anything, there's no protagonist or antagonist, and there's no real reason for it to exist. As I said, it's like a lot of ideas in search of a novel to tie them together, and while the ideas were generally good, or at least usefully-average, they did not form a cohesive book.

I didn't hate it and it didn't bore me, but I only kept reading to see what was going to happen, and in the end... nothing happened. Hence my angry reaction when it ended without an ending. Though this novel wasn't really any good of itself, I can imagine the raw materials of it being turned into something good, or even excellent, if Elizabeth Lynn figured out what she wanted to write about, and bent her talent and these characters and this land to some larger purpose.

That being said, it's not an awful book, and I've certainly read many worse fantasy novels. This one would bore younger readers to tears, due to the lack of conflict of a violent or romantic nature, and its vision of a largely magic-less agrarian medieval world is unrealistic (far too peaceful and totally devoid of any religious influences) if you're used to the work of superior fantasy writers like George R R Martin. But if you're an adult who can read quickly and doesn't demand a page turner, you might not dislike this one. I wouldn't pay $$ for it, but that's what libraries are for.

PS. I have not read Dragon's Winter and did not know it existed until after I wrote the above, but I doubt anything in that book would change my opinion of its sequel. If anything, Dragon's Winter might lower my opinion of this one, since I was assuming Lynn had just invented all of these characters and the world they exist in, and was trying to figure out what to do with them. Knowing that this is book 2 in a series makes me less sympathetic towards its wandering, conflictless nature.

When I headed to Amazon.com to see what other readers had said about Dragon's Treasure, I was surprised to find just two reviews. And since only one of them was a real review (More on Amazon.com's #1 reviewer and uber-hack Harriet Klausner in a moment.) I even added in my own comments. Comments that could have used some editing, in retrospect. At any rate, the one review there basically agreed with me, while fiddling around too much to actually say that the book was plotless, and giving a far-too generous 4/5 star review.

As for the other review, by Amazon.com's #1 reviewer... it's typical soulless, poorly-written back cover fluff, like all of her reviews. Look at them if you don't believe it. They are all 4 or 5 stars, all 3 or 4 paragraphs, and all sound like computer-generated press releases.  For Dragon's Treasure she clumsily-summarizes the plot for two paragraphs, before summing it up with the following drivel.

No one would notice if this sort of review popped up from time to time. But when there are 8632 of them from the same reviewer, and they all sound the same and give the same bullshit score, it's kind of hard to miss. The funny thing is that other Amazon.com users are catching on, and have been calling shenanigans on Harriet's tripe. Her Dragon's Treasure review has just "1 of 5 people found the following review helpful" and most of the reviews I see by her on various books and movies are similarly-unpopular. People realize she's just trolling for feedback and positive scores, I suppose, and even when she weighs in on books that have very high scores, people seem to go out of their way to disagree with her empty opinions.

My question is why. What benefit does it provide her to churn out an unending stream of reviews for books she's never read and movies she couldn't possibly have seen (given the time it would take to watch/read them all)?  I guess being #1 on the Amazon.com list is some sort of a moral victory, and she's clearly in a battle with the #2 guy, who has somehow managed over 9500 reviews, while #3 drops down to hardly more than 2000. But it's not like there's a prize for being #1, or a salary, and given that most people seem to think she's a hack, there's certainly no benefit of public acclaim.

I have to quibble with the Amazon.com scoring system, while I'm on the subject. As far as I can tell, they rank reviewers solely by how many people agree with their scores, with no attention paid to disagree scores. That method obviously rewards people who write more reviews, and while that's fine, it would be nice if their approvals were divided by the total number of reviews, or the disagrees were subtracted, or a percentage was listed, or something.  Then again, being as I just wondered why she cared to try so hard to be #1 when there's no reward for it, why am I pondering scoring changes to remove her crown?

Seriously though, how about a sortable top reviewers page, like something from an ESPN.com baseball stats page? Sort top reviewers by total reviews, positive feedback, negative feedback, percentage positive, etc.  Maybe there's some guy with only 300 reviews who makes brilliant points and who everyone agrees with, but who can't crack the top listing since he's got a real life and only reviews things he's actually seen/read personally?

Oh wait, no one cares. Right.