Reviews for Dragon Harper

The average rating for Dragon Harper based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-01-20 00:00:00 Adrienne Kutner Warning - Spoilers. Also this is a rant and it is brutal, so if you want to see me roast a book, then read this. Well, this book was not good to put it lightly. I lot of the reviews I see are quite negative and felt the same way as I did towards this book whilst the ratings seem to be actually quite positive. I understand that this is a book in a very popular old school fantasy series and I mean no offence. This is my first book in the world, since I believed it worked as a stand-alone and since I had no books left to read I thought I would just pick it up since it was a short book before I went back to the library and only took a day to read. I have heard that Todd's writing is nowhere near as good as his mother's, so I do plan to read Anne McCaffrey's work in the future. Let's begin with the Prologue, which, made no sense since there was no explaining as to what the heck was going on, whilst dumping loads of characters with your typical really hard to pronounce and remember fantasy names and from the get go, it served the book no purpose. In fact, the events of the prologue won't be mentioned again until towards the end of the book where it is only mentioned in passing. Prologue = pointless. Then we have the first fifty pages or so, which again, served no purpose in the overall sense of the story. In fact, the book doesn't even catch up to the blurb until a good sixty pages into the book. This first part of the book is all about dealing with this bully and has the main character being so brave and honourable and blah, blah, blah, because I still don't know how the old the character is, nor what he looks like and there is no sense in actually creating any characters at all, since we know nothing about them. Essentially, Kindan gets beaten to a pulp, but then becomes a super trained warrior, working to absolute death and training for a week before fighting the guy. There are many problems with this already, first, he actually needs to properly recover from his injury, lest it be infected or if it opens again, also, if he really was as tired as the book described then a few days in, he would have sores and bruises over his body, as is normal with humans, and he has been going to bed late and working his butt off for a week, then the would be utterly exhausted by the time the fight actually came about. Not to mention that some of the stuff like staring into someone's eyes until they look away is pretty damn stupid. Also, we also get a case of extreme Gary Stu where he goes from not being able to fight with his left hand at all to having the force and fighting blindfolded like a beast in the space of a day. Also we still don't know how old he is yet so he might be a six year old kid for all I care. Kindan wins of course and now the person getting bully becomes the bully since he makes the guy he bet a slave. They also go around talking about honour and a load of rubbish that was completely useless. Also, the bully that we spend so long on dies anyway in the end just like every other character we are introduced to so there is literally no point, except Kindan of course, who recovers. Next up, we have the love interest, Koriana who at the start comes off as this scared annoying person that spends several dozen pages whinging and going, 'what do I do' to Kindan. Then, we have the biggest case of instalove, ever in that there was no chemistry, hardly any conversations between them and we hardly even know what they look like, but her smells nice I guess. Then, one day when they are in the archives(which they spend most of the book doing), they(oh no!), touch each other and voila, they are all over each other. I have heard that they might be like thirteen(not that we are ever told), which like, it just makes this weird. This doesn't happen, it's not love, it's hormones. Then there are all of these instances that just seems to work out so well like, we are going to share a bed and lo behold, it's going to be too hot so I better take off my hands while I'm at it. Like, Mr Author, really? Koriana dies a full sixty pages in the end so they were in 'love' for a few dozen pages anyway, so again, what was the point. Then I did some googling and that apparently Kindan gets the hots for other woman in the future anyway. So far, the prologue was pointless, the first fifty pages was pointless and the romance was pointless. Now let's see what else in pointless is this pointless book. There are these instances where the guys and girls bathe together in the same bath and the whole thing is based on, no peeking, which honesty was a load of cringe. Now maybe this is a world that is very equal and no ones cares about nudity and stuff anymore, well, no it's not. Women have as much rights as they did in the 1200's, they are literally married away and are not allowed to have jobs that are 'manly' like ride dragons since that would be too distracting but, hey, let's just have these teenagers bathe together, what could go wrong? At this point I'm honestly wondering what even is going on in the author's head at this point, this is literally child pornography, but I guess there's no peeking right since everyone is so honourable and trustworthy. Then we have the plague and at how the people try to it. So what they do is spend one hundred pages of the book going back and forth in the archives, which we get like description of so I don't even know what it looks like apart from the fact that it has books in it. What do they find in the archives, oh absolutely nothing, but at least Kindan got himself a girl that's going to die in about thirty pages. Then, for some idiocy the author thinks it's a good idea to have characters hold a burning candle among books, not that we were told about this earlier but they were probably doing this the entire time which is such a dumb thing to do. So the candle is dropped onto the books and they burn, so all the time looking in the archives, they have no answer apart from the fact that we found that this plague happened not to long ago and here we have some serious worldbuilding issues. So, a little over a century ago, this plague wiped out a lot of people, but people seem to have no recollection of the event and that apparently everything seems to be running just fine even though populations in this sort of medieval society takes forever to recover from such an ordeal, but the author has completely ignored this. I mean, look at what the black death did to medieval Europe. Next up, Kindan somehow saves everyone and everyone is talking about him like a god about how he has saved everyone, when, at that point, thousands had died, there was literally no food to go around, his slave and the 'love of his life' had died and that he was part of the cause that burned large chunks of there archive, not to mention that he found nothing in the archive, which further brings the question, why where a bunch of kids searching the archive when there where masters around to do the exact same thing? Again, this book making no sense but just to serve the overly no personality characters. But that's not all, but the plague somehow just randomly stops because Kindan found out that it would by looking through a dead person's papers. It isn't explained at what the plague is, or why it targets specific people or anything, at all, but Kindan somehow deciphered that, oh look, yep it's over now, with no explanations, not even a bad one and considering it has happened before, what it so stop it from happening again. Then there's also how the book keeps mentioning at how the dragon riders can't help because they have to fight this thing called the Thread and since I have not read any books in the world before, I have no bloody idea as to what the hell they're talking about. Even though there are other books in the series, an author always need to explain some things, in much less detail obviously, otherwise we will never get anywhere, but enough so that a first time reader will understand. I had to go searching for information online looking for answers such as the characters age, but I couldn't even find that, but merely speculations since the author never gives any detail, unless it's on how much kissing they can fit into two pages or describing how guys and girls sleep and bathe together or that you can become a ninja warrior in the space of seven days whilst recovering from a severe injury. To sum up, pointless prologue, pointless introduction, massive case of instalove that doesn't matter because she dies anyway, the main character is a hero even though he did nothing useful but searching in the archives that ends up burning down anyway, the plague makes no sense, the world building makes no sense and is very dodgy, and I still don't know at how the plague actually stopped other than the author said it did. 0.5/10

Review # 2 was written on 2018-06-09 00:00:00 Nick Garcia Dragon harper was another book that was not out when I read this series the first couple of times. This was during the same time period as Dragon Kin and Dragon Fire. All of these have been exceptional reads. There are some of the same characters in each of these books. Some of these characters are very likable. This one focuses on a plague that hits Pern. This a terrible plague and it takes the lives of so many. Kindan is an amazing character and he has been through all of these books. This one is mainly focused on him as a Harper apprentice and how he deals with so much. This is just one more great addition to this wonderful collection of stories of Pern. I thoroughly enjoyed characters new and old. I wept for them and pulled for them. Another great work of art from Anne McCaffrey.