I had high hopes for The Dragon’s Path, the first book in a new medieval fantasy series by Daniel Abraham. Having read and thoroughly enjoyed his previous series, The Long Price Quartet, I somewhat naively assumed that Abraham’s new series would demonstrate the same level of creativity and cleverness The Long Price Quartet showed. Sadly I was disappointed.
It is not that The Dragon’s Path is badly written. It is not. Nor is it that Abraham lacks compelling elements. He has them. But The Dragon’s Path failed in making me care enough about the characters to hold my interest.
The story is set in a world vaguely modeled after medieval Europe. There are kingdoms, free cities, twelve types of human-like races, and a strange religion that involves spiders living within the practitioners’ blood. So far so good. There is an interesting premise and interesting plays on typical fantasy. The story focuses on a few people, all of whom are closely or lightly linked together. There is war, betrayal, power lust, regular lust, greed and any manner of things that promise more intrigue in books to come.
We begin with one of the free cities, Vanai, being threatened by the possibility of war from the King of Antea. A ward of a bank there, Cithrin, is sent undercover with the bulk of the bank’s wealth to another city in case Vanai is conquered. The story vacillates between her adventures, politics of Antea and the story of the brief war. What should work in the book is the narrow focus on characters and how the events playing out personally and profoundly change them. In theory, this is a great way to tell an epic fantasy. Unfortunately this focus on the human element proves to be one of the major downfalls for the book.
The characters are not bad per say but, for the most part, are fairly predictable. There is Marcus, an ex war hero who makes his living now doing guard contract work and has regular nightmares about the day he saw his wife and daughter killed in front of him. There is Cithrin, an orphaned young woman who ends up with more responsibility than she thinks she can handle. SPOILER ALERT, she can handle it. Kit is the leader of a traveling theater company who, while a good guy, clearly has more secrets than he is willing to tell. Dawson is the loyal friend of the king who is trying to save the kingdom from its somewhat incompetent ruler (oh shades of A Game of Thrones). And so forth.
There was only one character that I felt was not utterly predictable. This was Geder, a young nobleman who has always been mocked for his scholarly pursuits and lack of battle prowess. At first he seems like a sympathetic character, then a monster, then an easily manipulated weakling. However, instead of feeling like I got an interesting complex character, I more had the sensation of whiplash and flying between different extremes that did not necessarily make sense.
In the end, this book lives and dies on how the reader feels about the characters and because of my lack of overwhelming interest in what the characters went through, the story fell flat for me. I appreciated the ideas, the political power play and some of the menacing fantastical forces creeping in at the edges of the tale, but I mostly felt as if I had just finished the first draft of a novel in progress, one that needed to be revised to make the characters more interesting in order to keep the audience curious enough to come back for book two. When the second book does come out, I may look for it but only if I hear that it has truly improved on the flaws from book one.
