If you took Harry Potter, I Am Number Four, and threw in some Anne McCaffrey, you'd have a recipe for the Dragonian series. A boarding school in a mystical land with a heroine trying to learn her true potential, this is a budding new novel that could delight many young readers. Tragedy, romance, action and fantasy, there is enough to captivate an audience. While it's not without it's flaws, I am looking forward to the next book, and can't wait to see more of the mysteries unravel.
Firebolt is the first novel in the Dragonian Series and I found it engaging from the beginning. The action carried the story and the early mysteries presented help keep the reader in the book. The characters were captivating as well. Elena is strong without being invincible, and while there are things I felt she took too easily, for the most part she shows balance and growth as a character.
One of my main critiques with this work is there are some really awkward transitions in the story line. There are also some word choice problems that could be cleaned up along the way, other instances where words are just used too close to one another, and organizational problems at times with sentences. Most of these things are little editing problems that could get polished out in later drafts, but they slowed me down a lot in the beginning. Once you get farther into the story they seem less noticeable, but there was a point in the middle I was 'turned-off' as a reader because there were too many problems popping up.
Luckily, the rest of the book overcomes these little things. I like learning more of the history of Paegeia, and the farther I got into the book the more I liked it. The conversations felt less forced, the characters got more dimensions, and the page-turning quality kept me up until 3am trying to get to the last page. It made me wish I was a little younger when small things like sentence structure wouldn't have mattered. Regardless, I think this book is a gem and was well worth the read.
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