Dragon Champion
The Age of Fire series, Book 1
E. E. Knight
Tantor Audio
Fiction, Fantasy
Themes: Canids, Dragons, Epics, Fantasy Races, Magic Workers
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Description
Deep under the mountain, under the loving and watchful eye of a green dragonelle, five eggs hatched - but,
within minutes, driven by instinctive male rivalry, one would be dead, another crippled and pushed from the
egg shelf. The Gray male emerged victorious, against all odds. Grays are usually not expected to survive in
mixed clutches; they are unusual dragons, lacking the heavy protective scales of the other dragon colors, but
making up for the deficiency with greater speed and stealth, all of which young Auron will need.
The world is no longer a good place for dragons. The humanoid species who once looked to them for protection
from dark, marauding blighters now take up arms against them, and every year fewer wings can be seen in the
skies above the world. When dwarven raiders at last find the hatchlings' sanctuary, only Auron and one of his
sisters escape the slaughter, both too young to have their flames, let alone their wings - and before long he
and Wistala are forced to separate. Thus begins the journey of the Gray drake, a journey that will take him
to the far corners of the land, often in strange company and confronting stranger enemies, searching for a
way to save his kind from extinction.
Review
Told from the perspective of dragons in a fantasy world that has long regarded them as monsters, Dragon
Champion draws clear influence from old-school yarns like The Hobbit and Watership
Down... not always in good ways. Like those stories, it creates a sprawling world of various races and
species who mingle and clash, wading into legends and lore and poetry (and occasional attempts at archaic
language) and conflicting accounts of history - and, like those stories, it seems more than happy to relegate
all females of all cultures and species to subordinate roles barely a step above inanimate objects (with so
few exceptions that one can count them on the fingers of one hand with multiple leftovers, and even those
characters are often undermined by ultimately desiring nothing but to be wives and mothers), to the point
where I sometimes wondered if the original target audience was young boys still at the "girls have icky girl
germs" stage.
The tale starts with some promise (if with the "no girls allowed" club sign already prominent), with the
eventful hatching and struggle among the three males, introducing the dragon world as one red in tooth and
claw from the first breaths outside their shells - at least for the males, who are the only ones with
remotely interesting or distinct personalities. Even though Auron is a Gray, scaleless (though more than once
descriptions mention scales on him) and considered weak by some, his parents are proud of his unexpected
dominance over both Copper and a Red brothers (girls are all greens, because heavens forfend there be anything
like variety among females) - though the former is merely wounded, left to fend for himself in the crevices
and cracks in the cavern corners. Scaleless he may be, but he's expected to make up for it by being quick and
clever. After some dithering and further worldbuilding and dragon lore, outsiders turn up to shatter Auron's
peaceful (by dragon standards) world, leaving only Auron and his sister Wistala - both too young to breathe
fire or fly, with only the stories of their parents and mental images passed on from parent to child (which
include some ancestral memories, sometimes; there's some plot convenience over what can and cannot be passed
along mind-to-mind). Here, Wistala surprises Auron by actually being useful as they struggle to hunt and
survive in the harsh world outside the caverns, while still being pursued by the humanoid hunters who
destroyed their home. Maybe she will turn out to be a worthy companion and a challenge to traditional dragon
roles, where females are often considered little but things to mate with and raise eggs? Not so fast; it
isn't long before they split up and Auron finds himself captured by elves and dwarves. It is the first of
many encounters that will shape the young drake, showing him the bad and the good of the world, in
adventures that can sometimes feel clunky and forced to impart some particular wisdom or lesson upon the
Gray before shoving him along to the next thing. He soon learns that not only are dragons increasingly
endangered in this world, but that there may be some innate flaw in his kind being exploited by their many
enemies - a flaw that one aged black dragon (who may or may not still be alive) could teach him about.
Meanwhile, a threat to all intelligent beings arises in the form of a human "mage" and his fanatical drive
for racial purity, a somewhat heavy-handed baddie repeating real-world xenophobic talking points in a way
that many adult readers would likely roll their eyes at for being overused. Eventually, Auron's quest to
save his species inevitably must run head-first into the larger threat to the world... but not before
numerous side-tracks and violent, gory encounters engineered for maximum violence and gore, and some creepy
moments where a maturing but lonely drake begins feeling inappropriate urges toward a human girl he helped
raise after she was orphaned. (Because not only are female dragons regarded as little but mates and mothers
by male dragons, but females of any species are evidently lumped into the same category...) None of this was
helped by the audiobook presentation, and a narrator who, by choice or direction, made some... unusual vocal
choices when voicing the characters. His efforts to make wolves howling announcements - how they communicate
between packs across long distances - sound like cliché howls in particular almost made me give up on
this audiobook, yet another oddly juvenile signal in a book that does not seem to have been marketed as a
juvenile read and which contained content that doesn't seem to track with juvenile books, yet which always
feels a step away (at most) from being a boy's adventure tale.
There are, in truth, some interesting ideas and some solid potential in Dragon Champion. Despite
some anachronisms in what Auron did and did not understand about the greater world, the dragons here are
beings of fire and flight and fury, often to their own detriment, and each of the species have inherent flaws
that contribute to the overall chaotic, unraveling state of things. Unfortunately, the story keeps tripping
itself up by being too retro in the wrong ways, offering the sheen of classic epic fantasies without the sense
of solid foundation or depth, with a main character who has a way of coming across as a plot-shaped object and
whom I ultimately never quite cared about, in a world that kept reminding me that, as a female reader, I
really wasn't that welcome on its adventures anyway.