Review: Pern with a magic twist
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 3, 2013
I really enjoyed this book it reminded me of Anne McCaffrey's Pern series but with Magic and alternate god world creation going on. If you like Dragon bonding books, coming of age books, and also how to and physics books, you will like this book.  I have gotten tired recently of some YA books trending towards sullen, temperamental characters.  This is a great coming of age book of a very well mannered very likeable character and his friends.** Following text has spoilers, so don't read further if you don't want to spoil the book***I am not a great grammar check person, but I didn't notice any problems in that regard.  So I was never thrown out by that problem that sometimes haunts independent authors.This book, as I mentioned, is slightly similar to McCaffrey's White Dragon book in the following ways:1) The dragon knows its name on birth.  However at least it is so far not all the same sounding name and having hard time pronouncing the riders name.  I liked the Dragon's name, Anaya, was so very neat!2) That the dragons were created to work with humans to defend against a life threatening other life form. In this stories case,  nasty life/magic stealing nahual.3) Holds are created by a family or group of people "holding" onto an area successfully.  This is similar to the Pern books. However, the way the holds or "Caers" were created are somewhat different.4) Craft Halls: farmer craft, animal craft, and different but very cool, magic halls!5) The binding happens at birth.  In this case after feeding.6) The main character had to help the dragon birth due to a thicker than usual shell.7) The dragon can talk to mind to mind.However, there are cool things that are differentMagic is in all animals and humans.  Some have it to lesser or greater degree.Teenagers are can be sent off to other holds to try apprenticing different areas till they find one they like.The magic follows alot of physics rules: kinetics, vectors, etc. I found this very fun following the theories on how the magic was applied.  Also that each person saw how to use magic differently.I also enjoyed the how to's on the other crafts.The dragon's maternal knowledge inheritance was also very neat.  It made the dragon Anaya very interesting!As the summary says, there has to be the one who does something first.  This is the story of the first human who is able to link with a dragon to defend against the nahauls (as the trickster creation god intended).I hope you enjoy this one as well and I am really hoping for a sequel!