Dragon Keeper, the first book in Robin Hobb's new series, follows a group of people and dragons as they travel up the Rain Wild River. The group is looking for Kelsingra, an ancient, mythical city supposedly once inhabited by dragons.
Nearly everyone on the voyage is an outcast in some way. The dragon keepers are marked with scales and claws and should have been killed at birth, but were saved by their soft-hearted parents. The dragons, the first to be born in many years, are small and weak, with stubby wings leaving them unable to fly. A woman among the travelers who studies dragons, Alise, has a husband who ignores her. Everyone, it seems, embodies some form of the Cinderella story, and in my review of Dragon Keeper I wondered what would happen to all of them: "Will all the stories devolve into cliché, with every person and dragon living happily ever after? Or is Hobb doing something different in this book?"
First the good news: Dragon Haven is a well-told adventure story, one which certainly kept me reading. The intrigues from the previous novel continue and are resolved; a flood comes up and scatters the travelers, forcing some of them to survive on their own; the adolescent keepers start to grow up and bond with their dragons.
The writing, which seemed tired and repetitious in the earlier book, is tightened here, as events head toward their conclusion. Hobb's habit of repeating things, as if she didn't trust her readers to remember them from one chapter to the next, is very little in evidence.
And something that might be either good news or bad, depending on your viewpoint: There are supposed to be only two books in this series, but it seems as if a good deal still remains to be told. We never really see the place where the travelers wind up, or find out how they settle into their new surroundings. The possibility of a third book certainly exists.
In the end, though, Dragon Haven left me with a vague taste of disappointment. Very little happens that couldn't have been guessed by an astute reader; there are few surprises along the way.
Most of the romances end happily, for example, though the characters seem a bit clueless during the process: "There was a note of urgency in his voice that puzzled Sedric" (p. 15). Nearly a hundred pages later the poor guy's still trying to figure it out—"Sedric could not understand Davvie's fascination with him" (p. 106). And when yet another man becomes interested in him, he asks, puzzled, "Why would you offer to walk away from that just to take me to Trehaug?" (p. 263).
And it's not just Sedric; some of the other characters are just as slow on the uptake. In Alise's case, since she's lived a very sheltered life, it's a bit more understandable—still, it takes a frustratingly long time for her to figure out what her husband's been up to and to make a decision.
Admittedly Sedric and Alise have a lot on their minds: as the dragon keepers spend time around the dragons they begin to change, and the fairy-tale paradigm becomes more like "The Ugly Duckling" than "Cinderella." Thymara, a dragon keeper who was born with claws instead of nails, finds out that these are not liabilities but very useful things to have, and her scales and those of the other keepers grow faster as they evolve closer to the dragons. (Though the word "evolve" is probably wrong here, since the dragons are able to some extent to guide the process.) The dragons, too, change and grow stronger, especially when they discover some old technology.
Other characters pair off as well, and the ones who were working behind the scenes for their own agendas get their comeuppance. As I said, very little of this is surprising to anyone who's read more than a few fantasies. Are there "cozy fantasies," the way there are cozy mysteries? If so, Dragon Haven fits the bill—exciting, full of adventure, with an expected, familiar resolution.
Lisa Goldstein's latest novel is The Divided Crown, written under the name Isabel Glass. Her novel The Red Magician won the American Book Award for Best Paperback. She has worked as a proofreader, library aide, bookseller, and reviewer, and she lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their cute dog Spark.