Dragonsbane is a novel I read upon release back in 1985. Obviously, the world was a different place back then, I was a different person (young teenager) and fantasy was of a different flavor. Even at the time though, I knew that Barbara Hambly had gifted her readers with a refreshingly mature fantasy which would stand the test of time.

 

In the northlands, Jenny Waynest is a not-so-young-anymore sorceress, half-trained, who splits her time between learning her craft and raising her children. The father of Jenny’s brood is Sir John Aversin, and he isn’t your typical backwoods noble. Rather, he is a man of learning, who prefers studying old scientific tomes on engineering and pig farming than fighting. Be that as it may, he and Jenny have been forced on occasion to slay some vicious monsters – including a dragon! And now John is widely known as “John the Dragonslayer” though it hasn’t changed his and Jenny’s life very much.

 

Then young Gareth shows up.

 

Gareth is a southerner from the Empire. (The Empire which abandoned the northlands once the mines dried up, leaving their old subjects to the mercies of the northern savages.) Now, though, a huge black dragon has taken the Deep of Ylferdun, killing or enslaving all its inhabitants. Gareth having been sent on a quest to bring the only known dragonslayer back to the Empire to save his people. Only, Sir John isn’t quite what Gareth expected in his shining hero, and he certainly never expected him to be involved with a plain looking, plain spoken witch.

 

Desperation finally leads Gareth to accept John and Jenny for who they are; the three braving a dangerous journey back to the Empire to confront the dragon. But once there they find that Sir John and Jenny are viewed as a huge joke by the royal court, the king might be under the sway of a beautiful witch, and the dragon could be much more than a savage beast.

 

“Traditional fantasy,” I hear some of you saying to yourself.

 

So why do I recommend Dragonsbane so highly?

 

When I was a teenager, I loved the book for its escapism and adventure. Simple enough, right? Because Ms. Hambly takes the traditional fantasy tropes, twists them about a bit, adds some complex characters like the dragon (He was a favorite of mine at the time!) and turns this familiar dragon slaying quest story into a new and exciting adventure. Pure sugar-coated fantasy fun!

 

As I’ve matured (i.e. become middle aged), what brings me back is the depiction of John and Jenny. These guys are so familiar to my own real life: two middle aged people in a committed relationship with kids. Yes, they still love one another – even though they drive one another crazy – but they are both struggling with regrets, specifically the realization that due to circumstances they are never going to achieve their lifelong dreams. Yes, that causes Dragonsbane to be sad at times (though John and Jenny’s plight went over my head when I was thirteen), depressing even, but Ms. Hambly handles it all so deftly, so delicately that there is more joy and hope than doom and gloom, as this couple lives their life together.

 

I’m pretty tough on books. Hard to impress. Difficult to sway once my mind is made up. Perhaps my lifelong love of Dragonsbane is so deeply ingrained in my psyche that I can’t see its faults, but in my eyes, this is as close to perfect as a traditional fantasy adventure can get, and I’d encourage everyone to give it a try.

Dragonsbane (Winterlands #1) - Barbara H... I first read Dragonsbane, um, decades ago, when I was probably in my early teens. My recollection - faint, very - is that I enjoyed parts of it, but was somewhat bored with others.

Fast-forward to now, and my assessment is the similar. I suspect, years ago, my teenage self found Jenny Waynest's middle-agey angst a little incomprehensible. Similarly, her struggles with the idea of motherhood. There's a strong chance that I also struggled with Hambly's lovely, but sometimes overcooked turns of phrase.

Let's address the second issue first. In a nutshell, Hambly's writing is quite pretty, using all manner of interesting similes and analogies to describe the settings of the world of Dragonsbane. Me, I'm a big fan of a well-used analogy. But...it seems that a tree can never be simply described as a tree. Every aspect of the geography and scenery gets a detailed, verbose description. And quite frankly, a good deal of the verbiage expended on scene setting is unnecessary. Because, quite often a rose is a rose, and a tree, a tree. It was funny, because part of me wanted to spend the time reading the description, just for the benefit of my own writer's brain, to stimulate ye old white matter with the interesting prose.

But...for the most part, my short attention span demanded that I skim, skim, skim.

This time around, however, I totally "got" Jenny's existential angst. Jenny Waynest is a witch, living on the fringe of an isolated community, where she serves as mid-wife/healer. Magic, as taught to her by her mentor, is a cruel taskmaster and acquiring any degree of proficiency requires an austere lifestyle of contemplation with few distractions. Jenny's relationship with Lord John Aversin (the dragonsbane) is just the kind of distraction she should avoid. Particularly, since the affair has produced two children.

So, as she approaches middle age, Jenny finds herself torn between the good things in her life (children, John) and the inevitable frustration of wishing she had done more with her magic, her chosen vocation. Basically, she reaches that point in life where she looks back at her accomplishments and thinks, "That's it? That's all I am? Well, fuck." Yeah, Jenny, I hear ya.

What I particularly liked was that the story acknowledged an unspoken truth: that not all women are at ease with the idea of having their identity utterly sublimated by the word "mother." That some women approach motherhood with a degree of ambivalence.

Jenny loves her sons; she is, in fact, utterly floored by how much she loves them, but she still chooses to live on her own, away from the boys. (She sees them frequently; but someone else does a good chunk of the mothering.) She admits that magic continues to be the defining aspect of who she is.

At the beginning of the story, she is pretty much muddling along with a vague sense of discontent, but with no idea what to do about it. When Gareth, a young nobleman, arrives with news of an attacking dragon in the capital city and begging for John's help in slaying the beast, Jenny knows she must accompany John on his mission. This decision puts on her on a collision course with everything she has hoped to be but isn't, and eventually, the hard choice between family and magic.

Although the villain is a stock character straight out of central casting -- beautiful, power-hungry witch -- the rest of main characters are vivid and real people, including the dragon, Morkeleb. John, in particular is a fabulous mixture of soldier/scholar/geek.

Worth the reread, although the rather dense description keeps Dragonsbane from being a "keeper."

Final entry in the Winterlands series, as far as I know. Smart, and at times horrifying fantasy novel involving a war of demons where dragons and humans are nothing but pawns -- and know it. Plenty of action, dire doings, and some truly scary moments. Also, one of the best love stories that I have encountered in any genre. Not for the younger set, and it is advised that the earlier novels in the series be read before this one. Four stars overall, recommended.

For the longer review, please go here:
http://www.epinions.com/review/Dragonstar_by_Barbara_Hambly/content_581131013764

(I have no idea why the title is repeated in the header...)

Dragonshadow was a book mainly about demons ruining the lives of our main characters. So how can Barbara Hambly top that you ask?

Well, yeah of little faith. I mean, all she has to do is send our favorite characters to hell both physically and mentally, torture them a bit more, make them treat each other like dirt, and basically turn up the depressive “realism” to extra high max degrees.

Our main characters, John Aversin and Jenny Waynest, are broken people here; all signs of their previous normal but peaceful life gone like their former innocence. They are both searching for some way to keep things from getting worse for them, their family and their world. In order to do this, they endure even more tragedies in this book. All the horrible things the author puts them through I won’t bore you with, because you can only enjoy seeing someone tortured so much before it has no shock factor left. Hell, when there is no other way to make things worse in their own world, Hambly sends them to visit another world, which is vaguely similar to our own but full of nothing but gloom and doom.

Needless to say, I did not like this novel. Probably hated it more than I did the second book in this series. (Yeah I said hated because I despised this book.) This novel was all depression all the time. No fun, no joy, no hope. Don’t look for it because it don’t live here. I realize the author had some issues going on in real life, but it is uncalled for how ridiculously depressing she made this book. The Stand had more happiness in it, and I’m talking about when everyone was dying of the damn flu.

Stay away from this one unless you like self-flagellation.

Like a lot of people, I read Dragonsbane years ago and loved it. Dragonshadow, however, was terrible by all accounts.

The first portion of the book was tedious. Sure, we need to see what has been going on with John Aversin and Jenny Waynest since Dragonsbane, but here we get pages of basically nothing but filler material - at least that is how it felt. Then when the story actually progresses, we get a long, drawn out journey by John that accomplishes nothing except gets him out of the way: i.e. "busy work." And the plot is simplistic in a terrible way. I literally got angry when it was revealed who the bad guys were, because I had guessed as much many chapters before and was hoping for some slight of hand by Ms. Hambly to surprise me.

Alas, no luck.

But I mean, it has to get better right.

No, it doesn't. In fact, a bad book just gets worse. Torture, rape, and talk of pedophilia - it is all here. Sure we had that alluded to in earlier chapters during a different plot point, but now we delve into it over and over again. Page after page of it, getting worse every time the author describes it. Seriously, after the first scenes of orgies and torture, most readers will grasp the concept that these demons are bad dudes, that they are evil to the core, and that they can make even the strongest character do bad things. But Ms. Hambly obviously is just writing for shock effect, because she keeps serving up another and another big helping of hideous demonic killing or torture or rape without it actually moving the story along. By the end of the third or fourth such scene involving my previous favorite characters, I actually started to just skim what was written, desperately hoping that the story would move beyond this. But it never did. When I finally thought Ms. Hambly had resolved this plot issue, we just get flashbacks and dreams about torture, orgies, and rape, so we can rehash it all again.

No matter how awful I thought this book was going at this point, I was determined to persevere until the end, hoping that somewhere I could find a silver lining or anything to grab hold of to actually like. And my reward for tortuing myself with this book until the final page: no resolution to anything and wishing I'd never read it in the first place.

Now I've read that Ms. Hambly was having personal issues when she wrote this book, and perhaps that is why she absolutely tortured the main characters, John Aversin and Jenny Waynest. The depths to which she took this destruction was ridiculous however. As light and naive as Dragonsbane was, the characters were likeable, and you actually felt an emotional chord struck at Jen's final decision at the end of that book. All I felt when I finished this book was a desire to erase what Ms. Hambly wrote, which is bitterly disappointing since I've loved many of her other works.