Review: Not Bad but Not My Cup of Tea
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 8, 2012
I liked the premise and the characters in this story.  Unfortunately, the story was not a hit for me.  Individually the main characters (Dragoneers and dragons) are marvelous.  Determined, feisty, resilient young humans and (mostly) young dragons who are facing an epic conflict to save their land from monstrous invaders.  Unfortunately, their response to an epic conflict was to mostly act individually with little thought to team effort, which resulted in numerous setbacks and numerous near death experiences.  I can understand individual heroics happening a few times but this was the norm for the Dragoneer stories and just did not make sense to me.  Also, the number of miraculous recoveries from near death experiences happened a few too many times and undermined the credibility of the story.  The characters did have remarkable and admirable tenacity to keep fighting despite all of the odds and all of the setbacks but the lack of strategy to along with this tenacity was distracting.  Overall, an OK story for me but I was disappointed that such a fine group of characters did not work together better.Confliction Compendium primarily consists of the Dragoneer Saga trilogy books.  It also includes three novellas set in the same universe.  Postscript indicated that a Dragoneer standalone novel, The Emerald Rider, is planned for release in 2013.  There are two other Crimzon and Clover short stories,Crimzon & Clover III - The GrogandCrimzon & Clover IV - The Wrath of Crimzon (Crimzon & Clover Short Short Series), which are not included in this collection.Confliction Compendium is 10,362 Kindle locations long.  Standard length "paperback" novels run in the 4,500 to 7,000 plus Kindle location range.  Long novels can range from 15,000 to 20,000 plus Kindle locations.