Title: The Dragon Queen
Author: Alice Borchardt
Publish Date: 2001

"A writer with vision and scope", says the cover.

This becomes less encouraging when you realize that it's quoting Anne Rice.

Still less when you flip to the back and discover that Anne Rice is the author's sister. Explains it all, really.

I wanted to like this. It has a halfway interesting concept — after Queen of Camelot I'm a bit skeptical of warrior!Guinevere stories, but I'm not totally turned off the idea yet — and, let's face it, a pretty cover. Oh, but inside.

Inside we start off with a two-page "Prologue" which is actually a monologue. I assume it's supposed to be Guinevere speaking, rambling on about how books are evil, and Christianity is oppressive, and oh for the good old pagan days of free love and skinny dipping. Didn't Marion Zimmer Bradley already do this to death?

It concludes:

I am myself a creature of the dance, the imitation of the movements embraced by the dialogue between earth and sky. The dance of power, the steps I trod on the edge of a mountain so long ago.

Read that over again. "The imitation of the movements embraced by the dialogue". Would someone like to tell me what that even means?

As far as I can tell, the entire book is like that. After the Promonological Fallacy we shift into third person and the viewpoint of one Maeniel, who is a werewolf, essentially. He's going to a party thrown by Vortigen, the king of Britain, for reasons that are unclear, and he's all nervous about it for reasons that are also unclear, and the crew of the boat that brought him here is acting all weird for reasons… you get the idea.

On the first page of this opening chapter we get the following passage:

The people he served needed as much protection as they could get. Not simply from the imperial tax gatherers but also from the barbarian warlords who so willingly served the interests of those who monopolized the remnants of Roman power.

Which is not quite as egregiously meaningless as the first quote. I get where Borchardt was going with it, but my God, I think that's the most awkward monstrosity of a sentence I've ever seen in my life.

I kept on sledding for the next three chapters. Maeniel (that's a kind of bad name, by the way. Reminiscent of "menial" and also "mania") gets to the party, but also invited is Merlin, who turns into a snake or does something with a snake and offs Vortigen and a bunch of other people. Maeniel escapes by means of his Mad Wolf Skillz, then promptly hooks up with a she-wolf and decides to settle down and raise a family with her. What happened to his Srs Biznes with Vortigen? What happened to those people he was supposed to be protecting from the thing of the guys who are tools of the which? Never mind. The she-wolf is hawt.

Eventually they run into some humans who put their baby down and wander off. The wolves think this is kind of weird, but whatever. The adults come back and are all excited because the wolf-babe has nursed the kid, and therefore the kid is totally chosen, and they go on about it until Maeniel realizes he knows one of them, Idonia, and decides to say hi. Then they all go home for dinner. Except the house burns down over dinner. Remind me never to invite this guy anywhere.

Idonia is like "save the baby, the rest of you can fry", so they save the baby. Maeniel talks to a raven for no apparent reason other than that he can. Then he gets into an argument with a priest over what they're going to do with the baby, and whether Christianity does in fact suck, and then some baddies show up to try and kill them all. I think. That was roughly the point when I realized I would never, ever get the preceding twenty minutes back.

I think The Dragon Queen would actually be a pretty good, exciting story, if Borchardt could write worth a good goddamn. I literally could not figure out what was going on half the time. It's like she saw her sister's huge success, decided she wanted some of that, and proceeded to imitate her writing style. Badly. And given what the authentic Ricean voice is like, that could only end in tears. Tears of eyestrain.

Rating: 2/10