Review: Good start
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 19, 2014
First thing, I would actually rate this book 3.5 stars.I really enjoyed a lot of aspects of this book.  The thought of a hidden society of dragons secretly helping to guide the course of humanity is very interesting.  I found Peter to be a strong character and really enjoyed the roles of Tank and Richie as well, in fact Tank was probably my favorite of the three even though he wasn't as prominent.I thought there were a couple of pacing issues to be found mainly with the in-depth explanation of the field hockey games.  This could totally be because I know nothing about the sport so those passages didn't really hold much interest for me.  I did enjoy the descriptions of the dragon's game, Laminium Ball.  It may be because it's so much cooler to imagine giant dragons involved in a full contact game sort of similar to handball.Manson, the antagonist, was written well.  I really hated him and didn't like reading his parts, but I think in the case of this book that is a good thing.  He was just such an amazing jerk that I had trouble not skimming over his passages just to get back to the characters that I did enjoy.Overall this was a pretty darn good book and I would be willing to take a look at the sequel.  The only real drawbacks were the detours the story took occasionally and the fact that this book is written using a lot of British English.  By that I mean that there is a lot of slang and conversation that the friends use that has words that I, as an American, just don't see used in everyday conversation and it pulled me from the story a bit trying to puzzle out some of the meanings.  I can't really knock the author for using the dialect of his home region though, and to be honest I don't have a lot of exposure to it.  I'm sure it could be picked up rather quickly.Review copy provided by the author is exchange for my honest opinion.