Review: Worth giving it a try..
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 04 10, 2012
The Dryad's Kiss, written by R. Scott VanKirk, is a fantasy novel for young adults with a bit of mystery thrown in for good measure. It's not the usual type of novel that is typical of the young adult genre today. There aren't any vampires or werewolves. Instead there's a dryad, a kind of tree spirit in the form of a sexy, voluptuous, green woman. Yes, she's green but apparently the eighteen-year old boy doesn't care what color she is because her breasts point northeast and northwest. I guess that is important to young men.The central character in the book, Finn, an eighteen-year old, hormonally charged boy whose main interest, besides  losing his virginity, is role playing games, like Dungeons and Dragons, only Finn has made up his own for him and his friends to enjoy. I am not all that familiar with how these games work but the author did an excellent job of explaining how they are played. Finn also has a love of archaeology and he and his father and family friend, Uncle Mark, start digging up a "mound" and unearth strange items that seem to affect everyone who touches them, especially Finn. Here's where I got a bit lost. Had the author stuck with the story of Finn and his discovery of Spring, the dryad, it would have been an excellent book. Instead, there seems to be a few different threads of storyline that I kept waiting to be connected to each other but it never happened. It was hinted at but never seemed to take root. There's a whole prologue that I expected to be a part of the main storyline and was connected to the archaeological dig but I'm still lost as to how any of that is connected to the dryad. The characters are very likeable and believable and the writing is excellent. If I just look at the dryad storyline I would have loved this book. Instead I was left a bit confused but The Dryad's Kiss is just the first in a new series called The Chronicles of the Mighty Finn so maybe book two will explain some of what I was confused about in book one. It's well worth the read!