The Silver Moon Elm Book

Jennifer Scales is a weredragon, changing into one every crescent moon, then changing back to a human. The book starts with her taking a trip to Crescent Valley. She's bringing along a beaststalker and a wereachnid, both of which are usually enemies of weredragons.

She's there with Susan (pure human); Catherine (weredragon); Eddie (beaststalker) and Skip (wereachnid). The visit doesn't go well.

Xavier Longtail is another dragon. His daughter's father was killed by Jennifer's mother when she was a beaststalker. Jennifer, her father and mother go to meet these two and the meeting doesn't go well at all. Apparently Jennifer's mother did some really awful things when she was a beaststalker.

Her mother gets incredibly angry at her father, viciously so. Both parents have a lot of dark secrets they have been keeping from her.

Worse yet, she ends up in a revised version of history, caused by the wereachnids, where her parents don't exist.

Skip wants her to just let everything be as it is. It turns out (of course) that Skip is a traitor, and Jennifer is forced to flee for her life. She meets one surviving dragon, Xavier Longtail.

Evangelia, her evil sister, is going to have to be one of those helping her. Xavier is killed by a beaststalker, accidentally, but Jennifer finds a group of them who agree to help her.

The war is then on, but with Jennifer fighting under a handicap-she has promised to try and not kill anyone. In a war, that's not the best of advice.

The group storms the school, engaging in a major battle with loads of wereachnids. They storm the observatory, and encounter a number of surprises inside. They have to survive those, and then find a way to try and restore the earth to normal and, if they can accomplish those feats, find a way to prevent the same thing from happening by bringing age-old enemies together and achieve some form of understanding amongst them.

My own comments. Maybe I made a mistake by reading the first and third book (I couldn't get the second one), but I am somewhat confused by the direction change of the books. The first book was fairly believable, given the assumption that the were-creatures were some form of mutation or something. The third book, though, has all-out sorcery being used, so the story has changed from an unlikely but still somewhat believable possibility to a standard sorcery story.

It also makes the assumption that not one single one of the flying dragons was ever spotted by anyone with a camcorder, nor spotted by a pilot or showed up on radar. In this day of numerous spy satellites and on-line places invading people's privacy and having photos of their cities and even their own houses, it's virtually unbelievable that this arrange of were-creatures would go totally unseen.

Finally, I know why the book's ending requires Jennifer to forswear killing anyone in the final battle, but, realistically, if you are going to fight an all-out war, a final last-ditch effort against a more numerous foe that is gung-ho to kill all of your kind, promising to not kill anyone is an utterly ridiculous position to take. It works for the ending needed for the book, but it casts yet another attack on the believability of the events in the book.

Thus, although the story is interesting, some of the events are utterly beyond any form of logic, and the shift from possible reality to fantasy is confusing.