[Erfael]

Discussion is now open for the April book of the month.

[Trinuviel]

I'm still waiting for my copy to arrive with the mail.

[Erfael]

I don't have one yet, either...looking forward to it, though.

[LBRapid]

started this on my kindle last night :) great start, really looking forward to reading the rest of it this week

[Erfael]

I finally managed to get out to a book store tonight, as well. Looks like we're a little late, but looks like a good book, so discussion should ensue in force.

[Trinuviel]

My copy has finally arrived! I'll get to the reading this week.

[Lovefantasy]

Did you order it off Amazon? Or in the bookstore? I am waiting for my copy as well.

[Trinuviel]

Did you order it off Amazon? Or in the bookstore? I am waiting for my copy as well.


"That's my one cent"
http://www.opensquares.info/myimages/6c990b7aca7bc7058f5e98ea909e924b.jpg

I ordered it from Amazon, but it did have to travel all the way to Scandinavia.

I'm currently about 100 pages into it and I am really loving it. The prose is lovely, almost impressionistic. This novel reads like rich dark chocolate - rich and heady it can only be tasted in small portions at a time.

Fox is very ambitious with this one. He focuses on three POVs, all characters who are very minor in relation to the main action (at least so far) so we get a mundane and slightly removed perspective on the civil war in the Empire, etc. This might change but I actually quite like this tack as it is something new in relation to the genre.

The prose is lovely and very descriptive, in fact it appears almost impressionistic in its flowing stremas of consciousness in a way that is eerily remniscient to Virginia Wolfe. It is a type of fantasy fiction that one rarely sees and I love that the author tries to experiment with a style more common to modernist lieterary fiction while retainting the fantasy elements. I also quite like the oriental setting.

Here's the blurb from the back cover:

Deposed by a vicious ursurper, a young emperor flees with his court to the small island of Taishu. There, with a dwindling army, a manipulative mother, and a resentful population - and his only friend a local fishergirl he takes as a concubine - he preparesfor his last stand.

In the mountains of Taishu, a young miner finds a huge piece of jade, the potent mineral whose ingestion can gift the emperor with superhuman attributes. Setting out to deliver the stone to the embattled emperor, Yu Shan finds himself changing into something more than human, something forbidden.

Meanwhile, a great dragon lies beneath the strait that separates Taishu from the mainland, bound by chains that must be constantly renewed by the magic of a community of monks. When the monks are slaughtered by a willful pirate captain, a maimed slave assumes the terrible burden of keeping the dragon subdued. If he should fail, if she should rise free, the result will be slaughter on an unimaginable scale. Now the prisoner beneath the sea and the men and women above it wil shatter old bonds of loyalty and love and forge a common destiny from the ruins of an empire.

Dragon in Chains is the first book in a trilogy.

[TheEvilKing]

I'm about 3/4 through this one, and it's fantastic so far. Great start to the trilogy. To me it's like Bakker telling a Robin Hobb story set in China.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that, despite the kind of lyrical prose and the young main POVs, the 'grittiness' (for want of a better word) hasn't been sacrificed. There's plenty of sex, graphic violence, mutilation, murder and rape in here, on a similar level to Bakker and Martin.

In fact I think it's made all the more effective against Fox's lovely, poetic writing style.

[Lowlander]

Daniel Fox is in fact a pen name for British fantasy writer Chaz Brenchley. Brenchley wrote the Outremer series (crusader fantasy) and Bridge of Dreams duology (let's say Ottoman fantasy series) so it's no real surprise to see him turn to oriental chinese fantasy this time.