The Sun Dragon by Annabelle Jay: Well at Least the Cover is Nice

The Sun Dragon 

by 

Annabelle Jay

So the president has announced that he is in fact an immortal evil wizard and that a select few of the population are actually dragons in disguise. Said dragons are then forced to become part of his evil dragon army. Now it’s up to Allanah, a seemingly random teenager who is actually a level five wizard and her sun dragon friend to save the world.

Oh boy. I got this book as a goodreads giveaway and I wanted to like it sooooooooo much. I did I really, really did. After all when I signed up for the giveaway I read dragons and wizards and I got so excited!

As to how I feel about this book now that I’ve actually read it. Well . . . at least the cover is nice. 

And I know, I just know I’m gonna get slammed for disliking this book, ‘what do you mean you didn’t like it?! The main character was bisexual! Don’t you believe that books need to be diverse?’ Look books also need believable villains, good writing, and decent dialogue.

Allanah: Mirror, Mirror on the wall who’s the most special snowflake of them all. Look I’m more attached to the special snowflake trope than George Lucas and I was put off by how ‘powerful’ Allanah was. 

She was the most powerful wizard alive, she had a familiar who was a freakin’ dragon, she was part of not one, but two! Sets of people who basically bathed in magic. Why should I be worried about this girl? Mr. sorcerer-president Roland doesn’t even have a chance. 

I wanted to like Allanah! After all she spent her days reading C. S. Lewis and Harry Potter! But after maybe the second, or third time she did something ‘that no one has ever done before’ I stopped trying.

Grian: Dragon! Dragon! Dragon! I love dragons! Although I kept calling him Grain because . . . well we already covered that, despite my current hobby, I can’t read. Also he was a giant dragon who liked to chase bugs. How could you not find him adorable?

Victoria: Dude if you can turn into a giant dragon you should. Why is that bad! You can fly through the air and burn jerks to a crisp. After Mr. evil-president stops with the mind control thing I can see literally no downside to this. Unfortunately for Victoria she, like most YA friends it seems, disappears for chapters at a time and is only resurrected when Allanah needs her to go all black and scaly.

Cormac and Dena:

 I don’t even want to give these two a separate category. On top of all the special snowflake trope we also had a love triangle. Yippee. I think I’ve already got myself in enough trouble for not liking this book so I’m just going to leave it at this. They were both one-dimensional, I didn’t care about either of them.

Likes:

You can tell that the author is a fan of certain books: there’s a difference between stealing somebody else’s ideas and imitating an author’s style out of respect. I’d say that Jay toes the line at times but stays pretty much on the latter side. I can’t help but admire their life choices when author starts gushing about C. S. Lewis in their own writing.

Dragons guys! Dragons: I love dragons. Dragons deserve to be in every kind of book. Contemporaries’? Maybe I’d actually read them if there were the occasional dragon.  Paranormal? I demand a book in which the ghost of a dragon starts terrorizing the knights who killed him. 

Actually I don’t because I think I’ll use that.

Dislikes:

I am so sorry okay. I just did not like this book.

It felt like a debut novel: The writing was rather choppy. Every sentence seemed to start with ‘and then’ or ‘afterwards’ like some kind of to do list. One of those ‘and one thing led to another’ kind of novels that makes me want to face palm every time I read it. I am trying so hard to not be mean but I’m not sure how this book got praised for its good writing. It was choppy, uncomfortable, and formulaic.

Dialog: which leads me to the dialogue. It was so stilted and awkward. No one had a distinct voice and it just about drove me up the wall because I couldn’t tell who was talking to who.  They all spoke the same way and every line of dialogue was just so wooden. 

And don’t even get me started on Roland’s dialogue because it was the worst. Which leads me to the next complaint.

I cannot take the evil president seriously: he actually had a monologue in which he talked about how he was sooo evil and how much he wanted power. 

Look I would expect somebody writing a kids book to have a villain who knows that he’s evil. Not a young adult writer. Except in very special cases villains should never think of themselves as evil. After all no one in real life thinks of themselves as evil.

The beginning when he threw of his president clothes, declared himself an malicious tyrant, and what? Twirled his evil mustache and laughed manically. 

And then disappeared for as much of the plot as he could manage I guess. Seriously it was like playing a videogame with this dude. The kind like ‘oh I’ll make a few cameos here and there but mostly you’ll have to wait for the boss battle’.

Said boss battle was then hilariously easy and anticlimactic. I don’t know how this dude could get more comically villainous. I’m actually vaguely insulted that such a ridiculous antagonist hasn’t been mentioned anywhere else as far as I can find.

The plot bounced around a lot: like I said the main antagonist wasn’t overly present so the plot was kind of bouncy. It’s actually like this book was written entirely with blot bunnies 

(including seasonal spirits, repetitive romantic subplots, and some strange parental relationships) 

and Roland was only thrown in as an afterthought. 

I have said this before but I will say it again. I wanted to like this book. It was my first giveaway book and it was even signed by the freakin’ author! But I could not get passed . . . everything else. I am extremely disappointed and permanently terrified of the internet.