Irony is the Shackles of Youth

Yesterday at the airport I decided to buy a couple of books to read on the flight. I'd brought three books to entertain me on the trip, but given the 3 hour flight delay, I wound up going through two of them and miome told me the third was depressing. I didn't want to read depressing. That meant stopping at the Borders in the Las Vegas airport and picking up a book.

I like trashy romance novels. I don't read them as much as I use to, but I especially like picking them up when I'm going to be flying. Why? Because they are usually easy reads that don't require a lot of deep thought and I can get through them in one plane ride. This meant that besides getting Terry Pratchett's latest (Making Money) I also checked out the romance section.

Oh god, I think the publisher's have been scanning my brain. Since it's not on the Amazon site, let me type up the blurb on the back of The Dragon Master.

( Back of the book blurb here )

Seriously, did anyone think I was going to be able to pass up a book with that on the back?

The book itself, alas, does not live up to the promise of the blurb. The writing is okay, but the character's reactions to situations are totally unbelievable. I mean really unbelievable. So much so that they have all the depth of a parking lot puddle at times. There moralistic debates are laughable at times. The pacing is off in that I felt that most of the book the characters were blindly moving from one disaster to the other for no other reason than the author needed something to move the plot forward. Which half the time, it didn't even succeed at doing. There were times I was wondering why the scene I'd just read had happened at all.

Also, the author was obviously in love with the characters she created in the previous two books set in this world, because she used every opportunity to have them appear. Worse of all, I felt like the sex scenes were being used as filler. Seriously, the two main characters had sex at the most random moments. Moments when normal people would be doing stuff like, oh I don't know, trying to save the world or panicking because they suddenly had powers they couldn't control.

I do have to admit though, I kind of want to read the other books in the series (which includes Dragon Heat and The Black Dragon). But the best (at least description wise) has got to be Dragon Actually. Read that description and tell me you are not desperately curious. I dare you.

It's still not good enough for me to want to buy them though. Anyone have them or want to buy them out of morbid curiosity? I'm willing to mail my copy off in trade if you'll send me the one you have. Maybe a bunch of us can do a book swap of them? ^_^