I did indeed finish up King's Dragon by Kate Elliott last night.
I really, really enjoyed all things about the first half of the book. Two interesting characters were introduced. They are typical young fantasy protagonists in a lot of ways -- dead mothers, mysterious pasts, orphaned in various ways, thrust into unfortunate circumstances. But they are both interesting windows to the world and how it works -- a fairly grounded take on late medieval Europe with some magic thrown in, far less faux-medieval than much of fantasy that claims the mantle. All in all, it was hard to put the book down for the first night or two.
Then I made it to the Part 2, where both of the characters are swept out of their situations and into a war that has been brewing for some time. (Caveat: I was having a hard time with a contractor who was doing some work at the house during this stretch of the book, so I may have been a little more distractable than usual. My reading of these parts may have suffered because of it.) All of a sudden, we have chapters from other POVs that haven't been developed up to this point, and they're largely there to give us a window into how the war is brewing. The new POV characters have little personality and no agency in the story. They're just cameras pointed at everything else that's going on. Even when we rejoin our initial two characters, they take on the role of camera for a while, too. Lots of stuff is happening, but they have very little to say or do about it. Their individual personalities and what made their sections of the book interesting to me in the first half just disappear. A few chapters in the middle there feel like a data dump -- "Here's the stuff you need to understand the rest of the book. I, as the author, didn't manage to get it to you before now, so here it is all at once." They're essentially there to record the minutes of meetings of nobility and get things set for the end of the book...
Which I'm happy to say picks up really nicely as both characters become characters again, though they never quite get as interesting as they were in the opening chapters. I'm not usually one for battles, but things go pretty quickly and smoothly, much more quickly than I would have guessed. The conflict I thought was being set up for the series was resolved here in short order and things were wrapped up in a nice way. Which led to a good surprise in the Epilogue when Elliott tipped her hand at where things are going to go from here. And with that she hooked me for the next book. I'll definitely be diving into Prince of Dogs here within the next few months.
