Storm of Wings (Dragonmaster) [Paperback]

The story of Storm Of Wings starts out fairly conventional; a lower-class child, of a not-long-ago-subjugated people, tangles with the spoiled child of the local lord, and takes it on the lam to avoid having consequences falling on either himself or his family. Adventures ensue; the child becomes a hero, and is vindicated.

Trite, yes?
No.

Hal Kailas starts his life adventures in the common manner, but the story does not stay common. All manner of cliches are avoided, or are turned on their heads: The run-away peasant-child doesn't discover the Terrible Secret That Will Free His People. He doesn't even try. The hero doesn't stumble into the hands of a renegade weapons master/mage/pirate/thief. He doesn't even connect with the dragons, about which the story revolves, save for the incident that chases him away from home, for quite a while. Instead, he becomes a wandering laborer, neither abused nor heroic, but merely surviving and traveling. So much for the standard cliches!

The next, drunken, encounter with a dragon also fails to produce a cliche, and Hal merely finds himself the subject a few hours amazement that he's alive and uninjured. Beyond that, he remains merely Hal, Vagabond. Things begin to change course as Hal finds himself enviously watching a barnstorming dragon-rider performing for coin outside of a random town. Again, the cliche is avoided; this is no knight-of-the-air, nor is the rider heir to some long and noble tradition. Instead, this man's a showman, and belongs to the first generation to successfully tame a dragon well enough to saddle it. It's all about the money.

Hal manages to convince the dragon-rider that he can use one more hand in the show, and joins the little troupe as they wander from village, to town, to fair, always in pursuit of coin. Again, the easy route is ignored, and Hal is *not* trained to ride the dragons, but instead becomes shill, advance man, and handler for the dragon troupe. But competition is springing up all over the place as more and more entertainers learn how to ride dragons, and war clouds are in gathering. Times are tough for the troupe, and everything they know will collapse in an instant...

Where is all this going, and why does Chris Bunch take so long to get you there? Well, I can't tell too much more without giving away the plot line in its entirety, and I won't do that. Chris has a plan, and he'll get you where he's going in good time, and entertain you along the way, to boot. Suffice to say that if you were to combine elements of World War One and World War Two, with some elements of the Cold War, and the birth of combat aviation, and substitute the fantasy element of swords, sorcery, and dragons, you'd create something similar to Storm Of Wings. The various elements are distinct, and easily picked out of the story, even as you read it. Oddly enough, this did not detract from my enjoyment of the book, but merely showed me the bones on which the flesh of the story grew.

This felt a lot like reading the memoirs of a WWI soldier: I knew the basics (once I identified the inspiration), but still found myself interested in the details from Hal's point of view. My only complaint, and it's minor one, is that I felt detached from the characters. I didn't really identify closely enough to greatly *care* about Hal, for all that I found his story intriguing. It felt like I was reading history. While I *like* history, I'd have been happier with the story if I'd been able to more closely identify with the hero. Anyway, as I said, it's a minor complaint, and this story has enough plot turns and twists to keep you turning the pages until well into the night, as it did me.

Read it!

Fans of the WWI era will immediately see that the biplanes of the war have been replaced here with dragons. The plot is very easy to follow (read a bit thin) and the traitor's identity is SO obvious, that there is no surprise at all when Hal Kalais reveals him -- but, I love stories with dragons in them. This one deserves three and half stars.

Reviewed by Mark E. Cooper