Genre: YA Urban Fantasy
Reviewer: Lucy
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About The Book
Shutterbug Allison Lee is trying to survive high school while suffering the popular girl’s abuse. Her life is often abysmal, but at least her green hair is savage. Her talent for photography is recognized by the school paper and the judges of a photo contest.
While visiting her friend Joe, a homeless vet, Allison’s life irrevocably changes after an attack leaves her blind. All her dreams as a photojournalist are dashed as she realizes she’ll never see again. Despair sets in until she is offered an experimental procedure to restore her vision. But there are side effects, or are they hallucinations?
She now sees dragons accompanying some of the people she meets. Can she trust her eyes, or has the procedure affected her more than she can see?
The Review
It’s so much fun to discover a new author, and particularly awesome when you get to read their very first novel. Even better, this book was very well written, with some unexpected twists and turns that remind us that not everything is as it appears, and there are way more shades of grey in the world than we often realize.
These aren’t the dragons you’re used to, but they have a clever origin story and a rather terrifying natural predator who is out to annihilate them. And Allison and her friends find themselves squashed, almost literally, between the two sides.
The author’s descriptions are gorgeous, so you can clearly imagine the dragons and their adversaries. Early in the story, there are a lot of similes and too many fancy synonyms for common words, probably in an attempt to avoid overuse. But, that pretty much goes away after a few chapters, and doesn’t derail the excellent premise and plot.
The book has great characters in Allison Lee and her friends. They are well described and developed, so that each has a distinct personality and isn’t a cookie-cutter image of a teen. There are some places in the story where the dialogue doesn’t flow naturally and seems to be fighting between ‘really smart girl’ vocabulary and ‘cool teens hanging out’ vernacular. Fortunately, by the time we get to the very exciting climax, Allison and her squad sound a lot more natural.
This was Dan Rice’s debut novel and an excellent start to what I hope will be a long, prolific writing career. No pressure, but I’m looking forward to more well-developed characters and excellent plots from this author.
The Reviewer
I’m an avid reader who loves pretty much all genres except math textbooks. As a kid, my parents exposed me to everything from fairies, hobbits, and dragons to the biographies of interesting people around the world, interspersed with poetry, plays, and music. Into adulthood, I spent a lot of years with my nose buried in various textbooks. Now, I read whatever grabs my fancy.
