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A review by emtees
Dragon Heart by Cecelia Holland
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
This book left me so confused. I don’t know how to feel about it.
My journey with this book went something like this: for the first 20 percent, I thought it was fine, enjoyable but nothing special. Then suddenly it turned into something totally different and I fell in love with the language, the world building, the themes, the atmosphere. I was fully expecting to give this a 5 star review. And then the ending just… happened and I’m left feeling like I missed something.
To start with, this book is nothing like the blurb would have you believe. Yes, the main character (well, at the start; this book really has an ensemble cast) is a mute teenage princess who forms a bond with a dragon. Tirza can understand human speech just fine, but any attempt to talk results in her making animalistic sounds that just confuse the people around her. Because of this, and her difficult relationship with her mother, the Queen of Castle Ocean, Tirza has been sent away to a monastery. But now her family is summoning her home because their land is some of the last in the known world that has resisted colonization by the Empire, and Tirza’s mother is being forced to marry the Emperor’s brother as part of a treaty. On the journey home, Tirza’s ship is wrecked in an attack by a dragon, and Tirza ends up stranded alone with the beast, who becomes the first creature who has ever been able to understand her speech. Tirza spends her days distracting him from eating her by telling him stories taken from her family’s long, bizarre, myth-shrouded history, discovering a gift she’d never knew she had for storytelling. But she can’t bring herself to abandon her family and remain with the dragon; Castle Ocean, on some bone-deep level, is where she belongs.
So far, so YA-hero’s-journey. But once Tirza makes her attempt to leave the dragon and finish her journey home, the story turns into something else entirely. It’s about family and colonialism and resistance and community. It’s got political maneuvering on multiple levels. It has strong horror elements. It’s barely about dragons.
There is so, so much I loved in the middle section of this book. The writing is beautiful. The relationships between Tirza and her family are perfectly rendered: complex, loving, loyal even in the absence of understanding. I adored the bond between Tirza and her four siblings, and the way that Tirza’s muteness was just a fact to them, not something that made them think of her as helpless or less than the rest of them. The magic system is the best kind of soft magic - you never really know what it can do, because it’s not the kind of magic that can be pinned down with rules, and even the characters relying on it don’t fully understand it or what it will ask of them. I gasped out loud when I realized the big twist to the magic, something that had been right in front of me the whole time but cleverly hidden in the story so that I didn’t see it until the author wanted me to. There is a deep sense of danger and dread underlying everything that happens. The atmosphere in this thing - the creeping sense of inevitability as tragedies and “accidents” pile up, the growing awareness that our heroes and heroines are pawns of forces beyond them. The way the natural world of Castle Ocean, with its cliffs and beaches and architecture that seems to be alive in some way, is another character in the story. The POV work is brilliant; the story shifts between multiple characters, not only Tirza, her family and some of their people, but also some of the Imperials who have come to try to seize Castle Ocean for their Emperor and his world of order, and it’s striking to watch the breakdown in those characters’ views as their belief in a world that makes sense crumbles in the face of Castle Ocean’s weirdness. You also become aware that there are characters who are hiding their knowledge from you, and again, that’s done in a way that feels natural, not manipulative.
But then you get to the ending and… I didn’t expect every loose thread to be tied up because that’s not the kind of book this is. A big theme is that these characters don’t really understand much about their home or their heritage, so of course there would be mysteries that remained when the story was done. But I expected some of the many hints at bigger forces at work to pay off. Instead, the story ended incredibly abruptly and without really resolving much except maybe one or two character arcs.Tirza deciding to essentially leave the whole plot behind and run off with the dragon made sense on a character level, and if she’d been the main character for the whole book, maybe that would have worked as an ending. But by then we’d been in so many other character’s heads that it seemed bizarre to just leave them behind. What happened to Jeon, left with the remnants of the Imperials and his own people having wandered off? What was going on with the castle expanding? What role did the dead have to play - was Castle Ocean just going to become the realm of the dead, with the living all dying off? Will Casea and Dawd return? What the heck was up with the boar?? Luka seemed to think it was significant that it came from the mountains, maybe related to his father’s death and him leaving his father’s body behind, but then that just went nowhere. . Plus, the events of the last chapter or two are written so quickly that they lose all impact. There was a skirmish between the Imperials and the people of the region that went so quickly I barely noticed it was happening until it was over.
The frustrating ending definitely brought this book down for me, but not so much that I don’t want to immediately read everything else Cecelia Holland has written.
My journey with this book went something like this: for the first 20 percent, I thought it was fine, enjoyable but nothing special. Then suddenly it turned into something totally different and I fell in love with the language, the world building, the themes, the atmosphere. I was fully expecting to give this a 5 star review. And then the ending just… happened and I’m left feeling like I missed something.
To start with, this book is nothing like the blurb would have you believe. Yes, the main character (well, at the start; this book really has an ensemble cast) is a mute teenage princess who forms a bond with a dragon. Tirza can understand human speech just fine, but any attempt to talk results in her making animalistic sounds that just confuse the people around her. Because of this, and her difficult relationship with her mother, the Queen of Castle Ocean, Tirza has been sent away to a monastery. But now her family is summoning her home because their land is some of the last in the known world that has resisted colonization by the Empire, and Tirza’s mother is being forced to marry the Emperor’s brother as part of a treaty. On the journey home, Tirza’s ship is wrecked in an attack by a dragon, and Tirza ends up stranded alone with the beast, who becomes the first creature who has ever been able to understand her speech. Tirza spends her days distracting him from eating her by telling him stories taken from her family’s long, bizarre, myth-shrouded history, discovering a gift she’d never knew she had for storytelling. But she can’t bring herself to abandon her family and remain with the dragon; Castle Ocean, on some bone-deep level, is where she belongs.
So far, so YA-hero’s-journey. But once Tirza makes her attempt to leave the dragon and finish her journey home, the story turns into something else entirely. It’s about family and colonialism and resistance and community. It’s got political maneuvering on multiple levels. It has strong horror elements. It’s barely about dragons.
There is so, so much I loved in the middle section of this book. The writing is beautiful. The relationships between Tirza and her family are perfectly rendered: complex, loving, loyal even in the absence of understanding. I adored the bond between Tirza and her four siblings, and the way that Tirza’s muteness was just a fact to them, not something that made them think of her as helpless or less than the rest of them. The magic system is the best kind of soft magic - you never really know what it can do, because it’s not the kind of magic that can be pinned down with rules, and even the characters relying on it don’t fully understand it or what it will ask of them. I gasped out loud when I realized the big twist to the magic, something that had been right in front of me the whole time but cleverly hidden in the story so that I didn’t see it until the author wanted me to. There is a deep sense of danger and dread underlying everything that happens. The atmosphere in this thing - the creeping sense of inevitability as tragedies and “accidents” pile up, the growing awareness that our heroes and heroines are pawns of forces beyond them. The way the natural world of Castle Ocean, with its cliffs and beaches and architecture that seems to be alive in some way, is another character in the story. The POV work is brilliant; the story shifts between multiple characters, not only Tirza, her family and some of their people, but also some of the Imperials who have come to try to seize Castle Ocean for their Emperor and his world of order, and it’s striking to watch the breakdown in those characters’ views as their belief in a world that makes sense crumbles in the face of Castle Ocean’s weirdness. You also become aware that there are characters who are hiding their knowledge from you, and again, that’s done in a way that feels natural, not manipulative.
But then you get to the ending and… I didn’t expect every loose thread to be tied up because that’s not the kind of book this is. A big theme is that these characters don’t really understand much about their home or their heritage, so of course there would be mysteries that remained when the story was done. But I expected some of the many hints at bigger forces at work to pay off. Instead, the story ended incredibly abruptly and without really resolving much except maybe one or two character arcs.
The frustrating ending definitely brought this book down for me, but not so much that I don’t want to immediately read everything else Cecelia Holland has written.