"The Queen of Attolia" by Megan Whalen Turner

 My partner started reading this book series to me, we started with The Thief and recently finished The Queen of Attolia (with a pretty big gap, we forgot about it a little in the middle there). It was a pretty interesting continuation of the world set up in the first book, as well as the journey that our protagonist is on.

The book starts with Eugenides, who we know as the Thief of Eddis from the first book, getting captured in Attolia. He meets the Queen again, and she keeps him in captivity. To send a message back to the Queen of Eddis, Attolia has his hand cut off. Jen returns to Eddis depressed and having a hard time recovering. After a while, he starts to return to his old self, and he suggests going to kidnap the Queen of Attolia to resolve the war that has sprung up between their countries. 

Meanwhile, the Queen of Attolia is hosting the Mede, an advisor from a larger country. She knows that he is after her hand in marriage, but she's stringing him along for now. She's familiar with backstabbing advisors and court drama. Jen successfully gets the Queen of Attolia to come with him, and he proposes his plan then. He'll let her live, if she'll marry him and end the war. Attolia is skeptical but angrily agrees. Jen tells her that he loves her and has for years. That's really why he did all this. 

They are stopped by the Mede's forces and head back to Attolia. The Queen there sets a trap for the Mede and ousts him for good with the help of Eddis. The book ends with her agreeing to marry Jen and them saying that they both love each other.

The decision to maim your protagonist in the second book is a pretty bold choice, but I kind of like it. Jen can't just have successes as a thief, and now he has to adapt in pretty significant ways. He can still steal things, sure, but he ends up becoming a king instead as well. It forces the story to change with him.

The love story felt a little forced for sure, I'm not totally convinced that Jen has loved the Queen of Attolia his whole life. But he never mentions it in the narration until his confession so there's some plausibility there. It is weird but there is a lot of effort put into the ending to make their decision to get married also seem realistic and not a convenient change of heart. Attolia barely talks to Jen for a while and insists that he's lying until the Queen of Eddis talks to her. And then she finally talks to Jen about it and how she cut off his hand and all that. Then it finally gets resolved.

There appears to be some larger arcs with the Mede going on, and that'll be interesting to see how they develop. But the next book is my partner's favorite, so I'm excited to finally get to that!

This Is Beautiful: Vacation

 I'm heading out on a 2 week vacation on Saturday, and I am very much looking forward to it. It will be a working vacation as I make sure all of my i's are dotted and t's crossed on this paper, but that's ok. Gives me an excuse for a little alone time. And it will be so nice to just take a break from the grind. The summer has been restorative, but there's always less that I could be doing.

"Dragonflight" by Anne McCaffrey

 I honestly don't remember how I found out about this book, but I am not surprised that a book about dragons got caught in my radar. This is an award-winning book from a female author written in 1979, so I expected to both be excited and probably have some disappointments along the way. Unfortunately though, I think the disappointments outweighed the excitements here.

The book swaps between the narration of Lessa, a young girl seeking revenge for her family's murder, and F'lar a dragonrider. Lessa has been hiding out as a dirty servant girl in the castle where her family used to live, until they were murdered by the ambitious Fax. F'lar is a dragonrider on a Search, where they are trying to find new dragonriders. He is brought to the castle with Fax where he senses Lessa's power as she goads him into fighting and killing Fax. From there, F'lar brings Lessa to the Weyr when the dragon hatching starts. Lessa bonds with Ramoth, the queen dragon and starts to be educated in the ways of the dragonriders.

The previous Weyrleaders and dragon queen were both lazy and neglected the traditions. The country that they're in gets passed by a Red Star (implied to be Jupiter, of which they are on a moon) that sends out Threads from the sky that burrow into the ground and feed off of life. There have been no Threads in a few hundred years, so people doubt the importance of dragons and their keeping. A lot of knowledge has been lost as a result, but F'lar and Lessa believe. Anyways, a change in regime comes with Ramoth mating with F'lar's dragon, making F'lar Weyrleader. Also now the humans are a couple as well. F'lar starts trying to uncover the lost secrets of the past. Lessa desperately wants to fly and go between which is this way dragons can pass through space to get somewhere quicker. Lessa in her untrained habits then discovers that they can go through time as well, and dragons can time travel!

The Threads come sooner rather than later, and they are very unprepared. To help, F'lar sends some dragons back in time ten years to mature them faster. This is hard on those people, humans don't like being in two places at once, and Lessa discovers that the reason most of the dragons disappeared 500 years ago is because they came forward in time to their aid. She decides to go back to 500 years ago and manages to bring them forward with their knowledge, technology, and the like. The group is much more prepared to face the Threads now and can fight together!

Alright so I have a whole lot of issues here. First they're doing the whole "not like other girls" thing with Lessa as during the hatching she keeps making fun of the other girls who are terrified of the dragon (the dragonling does kill 2 of them). Not to mention that the gender of it all is handled pretty poorly in my opinion, it's never explained but it's evident that boy dragons mate with boys and girl queen dragons with girls. F'lar and the others keep making a fuss about how the girl has to be "pretty" which isn't explained until the mating. Guess they all want her to be pretty because as soon as the dragons start having sex the humans do too. Not to mention that there's a paragraph in the book about how if the dragons aren't involved F'lar is basically raping Lessa which seems entirely unnecessary. 

Then there's the time travel. Seems a little ridiculous to me that Lessa would be the first person to figure out that dragons can do that at all, but even if I excuse that there's all of these plot holes that time travel introduces. The biggest being that if the dragons all disappearing contributed to the decline in their culture and traditions, wouldn't leaving them in their own time mean that the traditions would have a better chance at carrying forward? And then they wouldn't need to get the dragons from the past. Or at the very least, send them back to their own time once the Thread fighting was done. They can't all have been happy abandoning the rest of their lives and living in the future. It's a very big sacrifice for not entirely necessary gain.

There is a while series here, but I am feeling very done after this book. I respect what it's doing and that it's award winning and all that, but it is pretty clearly not for me. I don't think I could do another installment of this, I just haven't really connected with the characters and don't think I could cheer them on through more of this.

This Is Beautiful: Getting Close

 I am nervous about posting this as I might be proven wrong, but I do feel like I am getting close to the end of the process with this paper. Things I think are coming together pretty nicely, and I feel as though most of what I'm doing is wrapping up things and settling details. Again I might be proven wrong because my advisor consistently can't go through everything that I'm working on so I'm just making a judgement call in places, but I'm really hoping it's getting close. The passage of time is freaking me out a little, it's July already, and I want to just get this out of my hands.