Wow! Just wow! I have to say this book is amazing! I loved it so much, I’m borrowing one of the characters for the next Dungeons and Dragons campaign I run. Seriously, I wanted to so much to give this book a Mithril rating (five out of five stars, see my post “Don’t Attack the Sundae,’ for the inspiration of my rating scale), but the novel still gets a Plate Mail Armor rating from me (four out of four stars).

Whitney Rines Dragonborn is a beautiful fantasy crafted from imagination and wonder. Do you remember the first time you read about dragons and magic? The feeling of reading something new and soul grabbingly mystical? That’s the feelings evoked in the reader upon starting this adventure. 

The novel begins with the sentence of immortals being carried out by one named Cabbah, a Goddess of chaos who’s duty is to judge and sentence beings who nearly destroyed the mortal world by seeking godhood. Cabbah gives the monstrous villains what they sought, immortality at a cost, damning them to servitude as gods with specific duties imposed until they atone for their atrocities. On a side note, Cabbah became one of my favorite fiction characters, period. I hope to see more of her! 

The story revolves around two siblings sentences by Cabbah, one Lizia damned to be the mother of mortals and weaver of fates, and the other Fayet who is cast into a mindless oblivion becoming an empty shell of a knight tasked with protecting his sister. 

Over thousands of years Fayet regains consciousness and falls in love with a mortal. This plays out as well as most greco-roman tragedies. Fayet’s beloved is poisoned, and in her own quest to seek immortality, succumbs to possession of dark forces. The reader’s heart breaks as Fayet’s children are caught in the crossfire of demons and gods. 

There is so much to love about this novel. The mythos is one of the most unique creation myths I’ve ever encountered (and I studied mythology in depth during undergraduate studies). The characters are the beyond dynamic, and the introduction of each is done with a soft grace not always found in fantasy works. 

There are a couple of constructive criticisms. There are a couple grammatical mistakes (added words left in by mistake). The flow of the plot development and timeline is well executed. However, what kept this novel from a five star rating is the lack of a full story being told in one book. I like a cliffhanger as well as the next reader. Yet, this book just stops. There isn’t a real individuality of this book to stand on it’s own. Nothing is resolved and the reader is left unfulfilled. Even in a series of novels, it is preferred that some plot point is concluded before the cliffhanger. 

Here, I’m going to include a little bit more of an editorial explanation for the rating than I did on Amazon. I’m going to use the fantasy series, DragonLance as a reference. When you read the first book in the series, that novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, by itself tells a full and complete story. The authors make it clear there is more to the epic, but it is a full story. At the end of the first novel, the reader doesn’t feel incomplete. When I got to the end of Dragonborn, I felt like I’d watched a movie and stopped the film with twenty minutes left to watch.

Still, this book is wonderful, and the series has amazing potential. I definitely recommend reading it!

Overall, the author achieves a epic tale shining with brilliance. I simply could not put this book down! 

[I received this book for free in exchange for an HONEST review.]