Shiara, the fire-witch with whom Daystar partners because neither of them has a direction so they may as well wander directionlessly together, is not the flying-in-the-face-of-stereotypes heroine that wins me in the other books of the series. I can’t say there’s a better narrator than Daystar, just that I wish that Daystar was a better narrator. The only reason for Daystar to narrate is to keep the reader as much in the dark as is Daystar. He’s not anguished or surprised or overwhelmed by his task or by the enchanted of the Forest. Daystar doesn’t have a particular interesting or amusing voice. It can also be used to write in a unique voice as Rick Riordan does with Percy Jackson. First person is best used to explore a character’s inmost emotions and reactions especially in characters who cannot or will not openly express themselves. One Goodreads reviewer managed to capture I think what bothers me about Daystar: Daystar lacks emotion and reaction. Why for me first person has become such a taboo, I cannot say, but I am only just beginning to overcome my personal misgivings about the style.

It is the only book of the series written in the first person. This last book is probably the least impressive to me-and so in that sense, I’m not surprised to learn that it was the first. This blows me away still because it proves what an enormous and twisted backstory Wrede had planned to get this one story finished-even if I think it would have felt somewhat poorly integrated into the text if I’d read Talking to Dragons first. I did not realize till I’d nearly finished Talking to Dragons (**1/2) that though this is the last chronologically, it is actually the first of the books published by Wrede. I just finished rereading the rest of the series, one book after another, first Searching for Dragons, then Calling on Dragons, and last Talking to Dragons. I am such a fan of these books, and after rereading that first and seeing that the love remained, I hurried out to buy for myself the entirety of the series, which I found collected into one volume by SFBC Fantasy. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles, for this site, and I think that review pretty thoroughly covered the wonderful feminism to be found in Cimorene’s and Kazul’s stories and more subtly in other characters’ within the Forest. I’ve already reviewed Dealing with Dragons (*****), the first book in Patricia C.

Calling on Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede