Day 289 – 52 Books in 52 Weeks

Excruciating. That describes Stephen Deas’ debut novel The Adamantine Palace. I think it’s one of the worst books I’ve ever read.

This was one of those books that had a cool cover (dragon on the front), the dust jacket lauded it as the next “Pern” series (which I love) and well, it has dragons so it has to be cool, right?

Wrong.

First of all, there needs to be a big label on it so that kids who are into fantasy/sci-fi won’t pick it up. Every chapter has some sort of sex scene in it. This is not a book for minors.

The story (which is supposed to be the first in a series – God help us) is set on an Earth-like planet. So much like Earth that they even know our swear words. Can’t figure that one out. There’s an evil prince, evil “Speaker” – I guess he’s supposed to be some sort of dragon lord, but it’s never really explained; all kinds of bad people and dragons that have run amok, namely a prized, perfect white dragon named Snow.

Snow has been promised to the evil Prince Jehal for his wedding to the daughter of the not-sure-if-she’s-wicked, but-she’s-definitely-ruthless Queen Shezira. There are sell-swords, I guess they’re like mercenaries, again, they weren’t really fleshed out as to what they are, but one of whom is Kemir. Kemir starts off as a loud mouth and turns into a vengeful evil man. There’s Jehal’s lover, Queen Zafir. The book opens with Jehal killing her mother (they’d been lovers too). Queen Zafir is just as wicked as Jehal. Well, basically everyone in the story is wicked or ruthless. No redeeming factors in any of them.

One character who you think might just turn out to be okay is young princess Lystra, Queen Shezira’s youngest daughter. She is the one promised to Prince Jehal. She appears to be a sweet innocent thing, but just prior to the wedding you see her lustful and almost hateful side. She ignores what her bridegroom is up to, even though he’s plotting against her own family. Then suddenly she’s pregnant with Jehal’s heir and disappears from the story halfway through the book. We never hear about her again.

The characters are poorly written. I mean seriously, they’re worse than … well, I can’t really think of anything worse. Those that are supposed to be evil geniuses aren’t really that smart. Evil yes, smart no, even though we’re supposed to believe that they’re capable of pulling off the most heinous of murders and get away with it. No way.

There are tons of discrepancies. Just a couple to show what I mean: Queen Shezira doesn’t recognize a dragon and its rider diving down to pick her up. Less than two pages later, the same dragon and rider are landing outside a palace and one of the other dragon riders knows who it is because she’s unmistakable. The dragon is one of the Queen’s own and the rider is one of her three daughters. Jaslyn and her dragon, Silence, are unmistakably recognizable by the commonfolk but not to their own mother and queen? Did he not read what he wrote two pages ago?

Another instance of poor continuity is when Jaslyn and her escorts arrive at the alchemists’ eyrie. There’s the big reveal of how difficult it is to get to it, the canyon walls are so close that the dragons have difficulty flying there (which is why the alchemists, we are told, chose the location)… and yet when two rogue dragons, one of which is Snow who is larger than the other dragons, show up to destroy the place, they seem to have no trouble at all flying around in this supposedly tight space.

Deas has no idea how to build suspense, to build even a basic character. The book is nothing more than random thoughts strung together by a bunch of sex scenes. Everyone dies but the most vile of characters, and of course, the bad dragon is “resurrected” at the end – because we don’t know how to end on a cliffhanger.

Horrible. Garbage. My dog could write better than this… and I don’t even have a dog!

Anne McCaffrey’s Pern, this is not. Not even remotely. Deas needs to pick up that series and see what a real writer can do.

I didn’t even like the dragons – that’s how bad this was.