More after the scores. (These categories are explained here.)

Dragonsbane, by Barbara Hambly
Plot: 6
Concept: 8
Writing Quality/Flow: 7/6
Characters: 7
Fun Factor: 5
Page Turner: 6
Re-readability: 5
Overall: 6.5

The hero of Dragonsbane initially appears to be John Aversin, the only living "dragonsbane," I.E. a man who has slain a dragon. John is a Lord and a knight, the only one in his territory, which is far to the north of the capital, and is poor, agricultural, and struggling to survive against the cold and the raiders who come across the ice flows in the winter. John killed a dragon decades ago to protect his lands, but as we soon find out, the battle was nothing like the "knight in shining armor" stuff you might expect, or like the legends about it tell. John actually used poisoned javelins, and sneaked up on the dragon in its lair since he knew he'd have no chance against the 12 or 13 meter long flying monster that can breathe fire if he let it get airborne. The javelins and poison weakened it enough that he could finish it off with an axe, while nearly dying himself from wounds received in the battle.

The poison was courtesy of the other main character in the novel, Jenny Waynest, a woman who is John's girlfriend, the mother of his two children, and the local witch and healer. The story is actually told from her PoV, in a third person perspective, and the most interesting thing about Jenny is her magic. She's not very powerful, but as she often remembers her teacher telling her, the only route to magic is magic. The only way to be a mage is to be a mage. Solitude, concentration, and meditation; those are the ways to boost power. Living a normal life, with a husband and children, is guaranteed to retard magical growth, so Jenny is constantly torn between living alone in an old stone tower and working on her skills, or living in town with John and her children and tending to the sick villagers who need her medical expertise.

Soon enough, along comes a young and very clueless royal messenger, bearing news that a great black dragon has descended on the capital and taken lair in the dwarf caves near the city. John has no desire to help the king with his problem, not when his people need him and the the king has so long neglected the North's needs, but since John's land is in dire straits, and he is convinced by the messenger that the king will be grateful and send aid, books, medicine, soldiers, and more if he can only rid the kingdom of the dragon, John reluctantly agrees to ride south, with Jenny at his side.

From there the plot thickens considerably.

Minor spoilers follow.

As we find out once John has reached the capital, the king is deep under the sway of his mistress (the Queen died years ago) who is also a very powerful and possibly evil sorceress. The kingdom is split and near civil war since the dragon came and the prince's best friend was seen, by the prince, trying to murder the king. That friend has escaped to a fortified Keep on the other side of the caves the dragon is holed up in though, and since the dwarves fled their caves and most of them took refuge in the Keep, they are thought to be in collusion with the rebels, which makes life very difficult for the dwarves who remain in the capital city.

As the story continues you discover that the prince was the messenger who brought John to the capital, that his father is totally out of his mind and didn't even know the boy had gone, and that the mistress is some sort of an evil sorceress who has ensnared the king and other nobles, and who might actually have brought down the dragon itself, in her effort to strike back at the dwarves who put an unknown hurt on her.

You know all of this by about page 150, and from there the book becomes much more interesting. John ends up battling the dragon, but things do not go according to plan, and Jenny, the witch who is the mother of his children, must make some terrible decisions about healing him, possibly with the aid of the wounded dragon itself.

End of spoilers.

That's enough of the plot summary; I'm just dropping enough of a tease to possibly interest you in reading it, since it's a much better than average fantasy novel. I like that the characters are realistic and have their own motives and think things over. I like that the big city nobles are spoiled and act like terrible snobs and assholes towards the country people. I like that the dragon becomes a character with its own motives and ideas, even though I didn't buy them entirely.  I like that the dwarves are important characters, and not just anonymous mining bearded idiots. There are even dwarf sorceresses, and their magic plays a major role in the story. I like that the ultimate bad guy initially appears to be just a minor nuisance and grows into the role, even if they grow a bit too far in the end. I like that the three most powerful characters in the novel are 2 women and a dragon. I like that the king's mistress is more than just some silly scheming tart. I like that John Aversin, the Dragonsbane, is a reluctant hero, a book nerd who is more interested in learning and reading than in battle. He even wears glasses, as does the prince, and while that's pretty much an anachronism since there's no other technology in the story even approaching the level of machinery that's required to finely-grind glass lenses, it's a nice touch you don't see very often. (Pun intended, of course.) The glasses are a nice enough touch that you can overlook the author's obvious desire to write a hero who wears them, regardless of the impossibility of it in the story's world.

I'll fit the rest of my comments into the following format, where I comment on each category in greater detail.

Plot: 6
Sadly, this score declined as the story went on. I'd have given the novel an 8 or so 2/3 of the way through it, but after that point it becomes a lot less inventive and a lot more formulaic, as battle leads to battle in predictable fashion. The scope of the novel was also a bit small; as if the kingdom the story is set in has a population of about 5000, no more than 3 towns, is small enough that you can ride a horse across the whole thing in three weeks, and has no borders at all. There's no mention of neighboring kingdoms who might consider a quick invasion while the king is out of it and they're near civil war and infested by a dragon, no mention of other challengers to the throne who might pounce while the prince is still young and weak, etc. Compared to a masterpiece of plotting like Martin's Song of Fire and Ice, Dragonsbane is a much smaller, simpler story, one that you'll enjoy more the less you think about.

The plot really went crazy over the last 50 pages or so, when the small scale struggle that had been nicely built up exploded into a massive battle. It's not very satisfying, it's not a logical conclusion to the plot sweep, and it basically feels like Barbara Hambly finished a draft, her editor told her they needed a bigger ending, and she rewrote it with a huge battle that came out of nowhere. It's not horrible, but it's very common and not especially realistic, and it betrays the intelligence that most of the rest of the novel displays.

Concept: 8
This is all the stuff that the plot got good points for. Bookish scholar hero knight, concerned more with learning and helping his people than personal glory, intelligent dragon with motives you didn't expect, unexpected bad guy, unexpected allies, major characters of the sort most fantasy ignores entirely, etc. The fact that the plot and climax gets out of hand doesn't reflect on the clever concept that set them up, though.

Writing Quality/Flow: 7/6
I might be generous here, but while there's nothing really poorly written or cliché in the novel, there's nothing glaringly awful either. It's not all formulaic Fantasy Novel 101, the way hacks like Salvatore write it, and the build up and character introductions are all handled very nicely. I'd deduct points for the overblown climax and silly conclusion, but those points are basically coming off the plot and overall scores, so I don't want to penalize the writing quality/flow for the same thing as well.

Characters: 7
As I said above, there are a lot of interesting characters, and that's what this score represents. I could be nitpicky and point out that no one ever really progresses or advances much, other than the prince who very predictably grows up and becomes more of a man, but the main characters are textured and layered enough to earn a good score in this category, even with most of the sub characters coming straight out of central casting.

Fun Factor: 5
I never really know what this score means on a novel, but while this was a pretty good story, it wasn't an especially fun one. The introduction is good, the middle is okay if a bit slow at times, but the ending isn't very satisfying, which is where this category really tails off.

Page Turner: 6
Eh. I read it fairly quickly, and was surprised how good it was (I'd read it once, years and years ago, and didn't remember much about it other than that I had a vague desire to read it again some day.) but I was never on the edge of my seat or very surprised by anything.

Re-readability: 5
I've read it twice, and given that I was able to wait maybe it 15 years between readings, it obviously didn't have too strong a hold on me. I did enjoy my second read, until the end at least, but I can't see reading it again any time this decade.

Overall: 6.5
The novel is 338 pages. These figures are all approximations from memory, but the first 30 pages were an 8, the next 100 were an 7-8, the next 150 were a 7, and the last 50 were a 4-5, due to Hambly trying to overreach herself and the nice, neat story she had up to that point. With a good ending, I would have given this novel a 7.5 or 8. With a mediocre ending that at least fit the scale and logic of the rest of the novel, I would have given it a 7. With the ending it has, I'm tempted to drop it down to a 5.5 or a 6, but there's too much good stuff to punish it that heavily.

Checking out Dragonsbane on Amazon.com, I see that it has a rather generous 4 star score, based on 25 reviews. That's not a lot of reviews, but most of them are pretty positive. I also discovered that there are 3 (and counting) sequels to the novel, but that Hambly didn't write any of them until the late 90s, more than 15 years after she wrote Dragonsbane. Out of ideas and returning to her earlier work? I've not read any of the sequels, but I'll have to check out #2 at least, since it's got decent reviews as well, and if/when I do, I'll likely review it as well.

Hambly seems to make a living from her writing, and she's got a surprising number of multi-book series, but somehow she's never quite made the leap to best seller status, nor has she become one of the iconic fantasy writers. I can't really say why not, since I've only read this one book of hers, but she's certainly got the talent. It's not like Brooks or Salvatore or lots of others are great writers. To generalize, I think Hambly's subtlety is holding her back, and that the wiser, tighter, smarter things I liked about Dragonsbane are not things that would much appeal to the hack 'n slash fantasy fan who buys Salvatore and other game adaptation novels. On the other hand, she's not good enough at crafting characters and emotional sagas to get the Anne McCaffrey and Robert Jordan type Sword Opera fans.

I'm just guessing though, based on reading one of her earlier novels, and for all I know this is the best book she's ever written, and should really be confined to posting her work on her website where hardly anyone at all would ever see it. *cough*