Dragon Dreams by Dusty Lynn Holloway

Dragon Dreams
Dusty Lynn Holloway
Genre(s): Dragons, Fantasy, Romance
Published: March 4th 2015
Pages: 420
Rating: 1 star

“A prophecy of murder.

An elf hunted by dragons.

One man who risks everything to save her.

Nachal is a human that should not be having prophetic Dragon Dreams. But he does. Every night he dreams of an elf running through flames, trying in vain to outrun the Rebel Dragon Obsidian. Every night he sees her fall. Sees her eyes close. Feels her heart as it slows, and then stops. Every night, through the connection of the dream, he dies with her. It's a spiral that he can't control, and it's slowly driving him insane.

Auri is an elf raised by a powerful human king not of her own blood. Left behind by the mother who perished far from the elven isle El`dell, she seeks to forge her life among the humans. Her journey takes her to the land of her heritage. To a place that holds both a haunting betrayal, and a miracle that just might save her life.

Together, they become embroiled in a conspiracy where destinies are intertwined, love is born in the fallout of ultimate sacrifice, and the only path to victory lies through the searing flames of dragon fire.”

A copy of this book was provided by the author in exchange for an honest review

Dragon Dreams doesn’t start out like the first book in a series; the terminology and lack of explanations feels more like jumping into the middle of an ongoing series. It was a little overwhelming to me and it set the tone for the rest of the book: boredom and confusion.

I’m not one who likes information to be dumped all at once, but I also don’t like being kept waiting for answers when it comes to fantasy. It’s a very fine balance and I feel that this didn’t get it quite right. It made a valiant effort, as things did start to be explained in chapter four, but they weren’t the explanations I was after. I wanted to know more about Nachal and why he was having the dreams, and why Auri was so important – not about the dragon war that I hadn’t even registered as important.

Things just felt a little all over the place and unrefined to me. Like the ideas were all there but the execution needed work and things just needed more thought put into them. Everything came across as trying too hard to be high fantasy, when in reality it was falling short. A map or even a glossary would have helped to clear things up and provide a point of reference. Whether I missed out on these features due to reading in e-book form, I don’t know, but context would have greatly improved Dragon Dreams.

I did, however, like the description of people and places. It painted a good picture in my head and was in-depth without becoming Lord of the Rings boring. Although, that being said, the writing style as a whole wasn’t to my taste and I was confused by the way certain things were worded. Some word choices also felt out of place and contradictory to how I perceived characters – they’d come across as shy and timid in their dialogue, yet annoyed in their actions, for example. Sections of dialogue were also unclear and confusing, even when I read them back multiple times. To me, the narration felt jumpy and seemed to flit between the present and exchanges that had happened a few pages back – and that I hadn’t fully absorbed.

As for the dragons, they were… interesting. I’ve read about dragons with the ability to shapeshift and maintain human forms before, in Seraphina by Rachel Hartman, and while not what I look for in dragons, it worked. The dragons in Dragon Dreams, though, seemed to take a back seat and didn’t catch my attention when they were present, mostly because I was very confused about them. I never got a sense that they had been fully explained to me as a reader. When I read the synopsis I was expecting actual dragons, à la Daenerys’ in A Song of Ice and Fire. I would have preferred that, in all honesty.

All in all, this didn’t meet the expectations I had for it and I wound up not enjoying it. The potential was there, but it needs more work and refinement. And also a lot less romance, but that’s just a personal preference.

Dusty Lynn Holloway and her work can be found at...
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