Product Description: Jane, a young human changeling, decides to escape servitude in a factory manufacturing enormous flying dragon-machines and undertakes to obtain necessary artifacts and a mastery of her abilities. By the author of Stations of the Tide. Reprint. NYT.
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Rating: - Fantasy the way William Gibson might have done it...
William Gibson said "The street finds its own uses for things." In this novel, we see this applied to magick, as we follow the adventures of a changeling (a stolen human child) growing up in, and moving through, a Faerie that's had its own Industrial Revolution. Dragons are intelligent machines and fearsome weapons of war (think of an A-10 Warthog with a mind of its own, only bigger and probably meaner); magick is used as casually as we do electricity, and the peoples of Faerie are far closer to the savage old tales of Grimm than to the Victorian versions we're more used to.
In this world, children work in Dickensian factories building war-dragons; high schools select a 'wicker queen' who is indulged in all ways for a year before being burned alive in a wicker cage at the Big Game; sex is both a source of power and a drain of it (the heroine's loss of virginity also involves a loss of certain powers); ... Read More
Rating: - Only one word for this one: WTF?
I rarely write reviews, bad or good, but this one really got to me. I'm cringe to admit that I haven't actually finished the book yet, but ugh... Why bother?!? The story simply jumps from place to place with no real explanation of the consequences of the heroine's actions. It's almost like Swanwick wrote a dozen chapters and then cut and pasted them together without rereading them. Don't expect smaller plots to be finished off... They just fade away and your left with this awful girl, doing awful things, to mostly awful other people. The main character is detestable and not in a good way. You want to sympathize with her, but she's so randomly amoral and simultaneously so whiny that I just couldn't take it.
Also, there's some fairly descriptive sex scenes in the book. I'm not sure that I particularly liked them (except perhaps the one with the butterflies), I'm always a little suspicious of ... Read More
Rating: - Depressing world view, unlikeable characters
The Iron Dragon's Daughter started off as a very interesting read, but quickly degenerated into violence, sex, drugs, death, and general hopelessness. The protagonist, Jane, is weak-willed and easily manipulated. You follow her through her factory drudgery, escape, and alchemy school as if you're drifting through life the way she does.
There are some guiding forces to Jane's life that I never quite understood; for example, the Baldwynn, or the somewhat mechanical voice that comes out of Jane's friend explaining how to perform alchemy. I could have missed the explanation, because at that point, I was just trying to finish the book and hope that it improved.
I don't expect a heroine to be Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but one that has no will, no objection to stealing to get what she wants, lots and lots of drugs, and worse, frequent random sex in order to obtain items (otherwise known as prostitution) ... Read More
Rating: - A Failed Effort
Not being a frequent reader of SF/Fantasy, I don't have many yard sticks to compare this novel to. Having said that, this atypical SF/fantasy novel simply doesn't do it for me. I have read the author's Stations of the Tide and was not impressed with it either but that's another story. I've no problems with the nihilistic nature, the bleak tone, or the lack of heroic quality of the protagonist, Jane. I'm generally not avert to pornographic description in a novel, but here it simply doesn't do anything useful to the storyline nor is it titillating in the least bit. It is not a difficult read as mentioned by others, just boring. The beginning where Jane toils in the dragon factory starts well enough but it goes precipitously downhill quickly once the narrative switches to the high school setting. The denouement, which I shall not spoiled, is pretty obvious to me from the high school storyline.
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- Fantasy the way William Gibson might have done it...
- Only one word for this one: WTF?
- Depressing world view, unlikeable characters
