Sanctuary

Dragon Jousters #3

Mercedes Lackey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

 

My wife loves this series and reads it at least once a year, so about 2 years I bought them in hardcover for our personal library.

I discovered Lackey when I was in highschool and during college. I liked most of her storylines [when you’re 17, everything is new] but found a lot of her material to be objectionable from a Christian standpoint. So I ended up being extremely wary of her works, as I felt like I was walking through a minefield every time I read one of her books. Now, being a bit more mature, I feel like those “mines” are more like dog poop “mines”. If I step on them, they won’t kill me, but they make me feel disgusting and then I need to go wash my feet off 🙂

Now that I’ve got all that out of my system, let write about the book itself. This was right on par with the previous two. Same pacing, same characters acting the same way, same gushing about dragons, same badguys being all “baddy”.

My first thought when starting this was “why are they keeping the dragons around?” The group in Sanctuary doesn’t seem to be planning on using the dragons as an army, aren’t going to attack anyone, yet they spend enormous resources, in manpower, time and materials, keeping these dragons around and planning for more. They are gigantic pets!

Then things get going with Alta and Tia and the mages and everything wraps up pretty neatly and nicely. And I know that there is another book yet. So I ask my wife about the whole “dragon” question and she told me that the next book addresses that very issue; I also asked her WHAT the final book could be about, as it felt like this one really wrapped the series up. She just told me that the story moves to a wider scope than previously but still wraps up ok.

So final word is if you liked the previous 2 books, you’ll like this. If you didn’t, don’t bother, this isn’t some how magically “better” than them, it is the same 🙂