TBR Pile Review: Dragon Rider, by Taran Matharu

From the ashes of an empire, a hero will rise…

Jai has spent his life forced to serve the cruel empire that killed his family and now rules his people.

To grow ever more powerful, the emperor’s young son is betrothed to Princess Erica of the Dansk Kingdom. An unconquerable realm, where ancient beasts roam. The princess brings with her a priceless gift: dragons. Only Dansk Royalty can bond with these magical beasts to draw on their power and strength. Until now.

When the betrothal goes wrong, a bloody coup leads to chaos at court. Finally, Jai has a chance to escape. He flees with a fierce Dansk warrior, Frida, but not before stealing a dragon egg.

To vanquish the empire, he must do the impossible: bond with a dragon. Only then he can seize his destiny, and seek his revenge …

An epic new fantasy, where dragons fly and empires fall.

My Review

I really need to get better at writing these summaries. I have three different editions of this book. Two are special editions, one each from Goldsboro Books and The Broken Binding, and the third is an ARC I won in a competition the publisher held in February. I’ve had it since March. I wanted to finish it long before now, but blog tours kept getting in the way. In the last few days, I’ve had time to read about two thirds of this chonker of a novel. So, read on of you don’t mind an outline of the first four hundred pages and some background, before you get to my opinions.

Spoilers below! Scroll quickly down to the separator if you don’t want to see them. I don’t spoil the ending or any of the real details.

Jai is 17 and he’s spent most of his life as a hostage of the Sabine Empire, specifically as the servant of the former Emperor, Leonid. His uncle sold his brothers and him as hostages after their father Rohan died in the final battle between the Steppemen and the Sabine Empire. Jai was very young at the time. He’s raised, as a hostage, by his nurse Balbir, until he’s old enough to serve Leonid. His older brothers are sent to serve the new Emperor’s son, Titus.

When the story opens, Jai is seventeen, and feels like the most unlucky person in the world. He sleeps in a cupboard and serves a blind, ailing man who is forgotten by his family. He gets beaten frequently and has no way to defend himself. He’s never even been outside of the city of Latium since he arrived as a small child, he’s scared of everyone and dreams of freedom.

But the Sabine Empire has one last enemy to defeat: the Huddites, once a nomadic warrior people, they’ve been hemmed in by the empire and forced to farm to survive. Pushed almost to extinction, they fight back, and the Sabine Empire has an excuse to finally destroy them. For the first time in his memory, Jai leaves the city, accompanying Leonid, to the battle. They have front row seats to the theatre of war.

Literally.

The Emperor, Constantine, is so convinced of his victory that he, the extended imperial family, and a large number of Sabine nobles, watch from tiered seating around a stage containing the throne, so they can see the action. It’s a bit arrogant, but the legions are the best, and they’re fully armed. The Huddites are starving and armed with field tools.

But they’re desperate and fight back vigorously, preferring death in battle to fettering (enslavement). It almost looks like the impossible will happen, the legions will be defeated by starving farmers.

And then the Dansk arrive on their dragons and turn the battle for the empire.

It’s King Ivar and his daughter Erica, heir apparent to the Dansk kingdom and soulbound to a dragon. They’re there for a wedding. Princess Erica will marry Prince Titus, and bring a young golden dragon with her as her dowry. Erica, of course, already has a dragon of her own. No other nation has learnt to soulbind to dragons. The Empire can’t expand into their lands because of the dragons, so a marriage alliance it is.

Jai, from his position beside Leonid’s chair narrates everything he sees, and ponders what it all means.

Things pretty much go downhill from there. They get back to the city, there’s a hunt, a massacre, a desperate escape, a dragon’s egg, then flight into the wilds, a desperate rush for home. The egg hatches, a small, white dragon. Jai does something no non-Dansk has ever done – he soulbinds with the dragon. Jai meets Frida, Erica’s handmaiden as her dragon is dying in the woods outside of Latium; they decide to travel together along the Kashmere Road, eastward, to the mountains where their two lands meet.

Nothing goes to plan, until they fall in with an old drunk, called Rufus, who wields a whytblade sword and can still fight despite serious efforts for a decade to drink himself to death on bad wine. Rufus teaches Jai to fight and to use his magic.

They travel for weeks until they’re drugged and ambushed. Now we enter the final act. It looks like all is over for our trio of soulbound humans, a baby dragon and their loyal steed, a khiroi (sort of like a yak, but bigger, and nastier).

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Spoilers over!

This is a slow burner.

The first act builds the tension and ends with a massacre. It’s the end of Jai’s life as he has known it. Everyone he cares about is dead.

Jai and Leonid have an extremely unhealthy relationship. Dependant on each other, to Leonid, Jai represents his one failure and his failing health, his weakness and dependency, while to Jai, Leonid is the reminder of his father’s death, the subjugation of his people and his own imprisonment and abuse, his weakness and dependency. This relationship ends violently, and, despite hating Leonid, he is traumatised by his death, coming so soon after witnessing a massacre. We see Leonid as both the hero and the villain, the great emperor abandoned, who has first abandoned his empire sickened by blood.

In the second act, Jai is rebuilding his sense of self, making new allies in a dangerous world. His relationship with Winter, his dragon, is the most loving one he’s ever experienced, while his developing friendship with Frida is based on their mutual need to survive. Frida is grieving the loss of her dragon, her friends and her family, and is cut off from everything except survival. When Rufus joins them, he takes on a mentoring role for Jai, and evens out the power imbalance. Frida already knows how to use mana, but she’s not good at teaching, while Jai needs to learn as much as possible as fast as possible. The three of them, with Winter and Navi the khiroi form a small and inevitably short-lived family. They plan to split up eventually. That happens before they expect it when they’re ambushed.

The third act finds Jai and Frida imprisoned, but as close to home as they could both want to be. They are at rock bottom, lower even than at the end of the first act. How will they survive, escape and win freedom? This is where everything they’ve experienced in the first two acts comes together. Jai must go to the edge of death again, become who he was meant to be, and lead them, and all the other prisoners to freedom. But everyone needs allies and Jai has no one left, although he knows Winter is getting closer. He has to believe in himself. He realises the life he had in the palace might have been unpleasant but life could be so much worse. His self pity fades in the face of the horrifying conditions of the Huddite prisoners, and his own near death experiences. He finally realises something I worked out fairly quickly (which I am not going to tell you) and feels betrayed but puts that aside to keep his promises.

The novel has a clear structure, presented with skill and clear descriptions, and with character development for the main character, Jai. The development of Jai and Frida’s friendship, based initially on their mutual hate of the Sabines and need to survive, becomes more solid as time passes on the road, and saving each other a few times doesn’t do any harm. Their relationship with Rufus is different, he lies to and for them, could betray them and doesn’t, and when he could leave, he comes to help them, but is forced to separate from them to fight his own battles, to face his own past. All three main characters have development arcs of their own, although Jai is the focus of the narrative. It would be interesting to see the next book as a multi POV narrative as the three have separated an must continue their journeys alone.

The world is clearly inspired by the Roman Empire, with the Chinese Empire inspire Phoenix Empire to the east, and the Mogul Empire, the Steppemen, in between, and a Scandinavian-inspired culture in the north with the Dansk. Cultures from different times and places brought into conjunction with each other. There’s references to cultures beyond those directly encountered by Jai and the consequences of imperialism explored using these realworld examples as templates.

Have you heard of the legend of the Sabine women, when the men of early Rome attacked a neighbouring city and stole women as wives? Latium was the country of the Latia, a tribe in the area that eventually gave birth to the Roman Empire, on the left bank of the Tiber. The Kashmere Road is obviously a reference to the Silk Road, that brought goods, ideas and people from one end of the Eurasian Continent to the other. It still does, actually.

I find the way the historical inspirations have been changed slightly and infused with magic and mythology, to produce a larger world, quite delightful, strange and familiar at the same time. You could almost plot Jai, Frida and Rufus’ journey on a map. Almost, but not quite. There are full colour maps in my hardback editions, by the way. They’re very pretty. You can see it here on my Instagram, along with the covers of my special editions.

So, in summary, I really enjoyed this book! The ending was fantastic. I want the next book as soon as possible. I need to know what happens! Seriously, I had to go for the ‘analyse the structure’ route for this review or it would have just been incoherent screaming.

(Fantasy rant incoming)

I liked that Jai has a solid change in his character, and that Jai and Frida develop a friendship! Do you know how rare it is to find a man and woman in fantasy, who are brought together by fate, spend weeks in each others’ company, fight and save each other, and don’t end up sleeping together? Well, of course you do, you read fantasy, and the romantasy sub-genre has been very prevalent recently. Isn’t a fun change of pace, to have two people, of different genders, being good friends? 20 years ago, I remember the fantasy novels I read at the time (James Barclay’s Chronicles of the Raven, for example, or Weiss and Hickmann’s DragonLance Chronicles), if there was an ensemble cast, and at least one woman, there would be a sex scene, marriage, coupling up. It was soooo boring and repetitive, and for some reason, as more women have started being known fantasy writers (women have always been part of the genre as readers and writers, but they weren’t ‘catered to’ because people assumed sci fi and fantasy were for men) the push has been more towards urban fantasy and romantic fantasy. I like a good epic fantasy, with friendships and adventures, and dragons! Lord of the Rings had friendship, adventure, and dragons. The Tales of Earthsea had friendship, adventure and dragons. It’s a time-tested formula. It works well. Especially the dragons.

Everything is better with dragons, after all.