Review: To Shape a Dragon's Breath

     

  Non-Spoiler Summary:

    Aneques is a young woman from the island of Masquapaug.  She is her mother’s oldest daughter and stands to someday inherit her mother’s  home, lands, and her place in their society.   She is content and happy in her life.  As she is out gathering oysters with her siblings, she happens upon a wild dragon.  When she returns to the spot the next day to pray, Aneques finds an egg.  She has no idea when she takes the egg home that is breaking the law. Her people once lived among dragons.  Dragons are part of their tradition and heritage.  Aneques has no idea that when the dragon hatches and bonds itself to her that the she has committed a grievous taboo in the eyes of the nearby colonizers that will put unwanted attention on Aneques and her village.  

There are no dragon-tamers left on Maquapaug.  So Aneques is advised by her brother to attend the nearby dragon training school in the city on the mainland.  There she can learn about how to take care of her new baby dragon. Going to the school will give Aneques and her dragon, Kasaqua, a chance to learn how to help their village grow and thrive.  Not going to the school could lead to Kasaqua being killed or taken away from Aneques.  So Aneques attends Kuiper’s Academy of Natural Philosophy and Skilltakraft.  But once she’s there she learns that if she doesn’t pass the final exam she may never be allowed to leave.  

"To Shape a Dragon’s Breath" is a slow paced beautifully written story about a young woman coming of age in an unfamiliar place while daring to stay true to her culture and beliefs.  It’s "Harry Potter" meets "How to Train your Dragon" told through the POV of a native girl among steam-punk Vikings.  

I would recommend this story to any YA fiction reader who feels out of place, and under appreciated.  

About the Author

    Monniquill Blackgoose is an indigenous woman with a lot to say about her work, her culture, and her inspirations.   She is an enrolled member of the Seaconck Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts and Rohode Islands.  She a descendant of the Ousamequin Massasoit peoples.

  You can learn more about Monniquill in this intriguing interview with Locus Magazine 

Spoiler-ish Review

What I liked

I like how Blackgoose told the story of history of this world though a series of characters telling their own stories.   It was a clever way to show that here mythology is history and history is religion in this world.     I also really enjoyed the different steampunk settings and how society is wrapped around who can and can’t own a dragon.

  

What I loved -

  

Image by Hifzhan Graphics

    The diversity of characters.  Moniquill didn’t shy away from diversity in this novel.   A black female indentured servant becomes a love interest.  So does the rude handsome native boy.  Our MC befriends an autistic aristocrat and thereby extension his sister.  The only other female character Anequs meets at the school is neither her instant best friend, nor her mean girl enemy.  She is a true to life daughter of a wealthy family who wants to stay blended into society, but Anequs challenges her roommate’s goals and ideals.  The girls have to work at their relationship, but at the end of this first book in the series, they are more like acquaintances than friends.  

What I disliked

The Pacing (at first). It can be easy for book reviewers, like myself, to become impatient.  We are often reading quickly, hurrying ahead mentally to guess at the plot, beats, and twists.  We rush through because there is always another book in our cue awaiting our attention.  That was how I was feeling as I crashed into “To Shape a Dragon’s Breath”.  

I was, at first, trusted to find myself being slowed down by the patient unfolding of a coming of age school drama…with dragons. I was expecting battles and complicated senerios, tragic misunderstandings and characters that had a difficult time explaining themselves.

Image by Yulia Gapeenka

This is book was not that at all.  Halfway through the first act my brain sort of took a sigh of relief and I realized that I was beginning to appricate the slow pacing, and the low stacks after all the horrors I’d trudged through in the other novels.  I realized that the novel itself was being told like a live storytelling fable.  And then, the Aniques slapped a rich little white boy for being a jerk and the story the began to take off.  

I realized that Anique being patient and well-spoken and communicating her thoughts clearly while going along with the culture around her was the point.  Because even though she’s doing everything right her life is still threatened.  She has to be an example for her people but she’s only a teenager, she doesn’t know all the traps set by adults to win political points in Anglish culture.  Despite doing everything she is suppose to, she is still treated like a savage.  And when she attempts to open the doors of diversity for others like herself,  people are killed.

So not really a dislike anymore, but it bugged me for ages.    

I really disliked of the descriptions of the lessons in some places.  The detailed descriptions of Skilltacraft in the first class was agonizing.  I appreciate  how much research in chemistry, languages, and language histories,  Blackgoose must have put into all of this.  My old brain was very resistant to learn a new language…but as this novel is aimed at much younger and fluid brains than mine I will defer to the target audience of whether or not this worked.  

Taking it Personally 

 This novel was personal to me.  Blackgoose illustrates exactly how it feels to be a minority person in an all white setting.  The story reminds me of times when I was the only black girl in the room, or the class, or on the job.  Well established white boys felt at liberty to say all sort of things to me - some out of genuine curiosity, others to get a rise out of me.  They all expected my genuine reaction to amuse or entertain them in some way - none of them understood that I could not give my genuine opinion because of the inherit threat they're attention imposed.   

Anequs does nothing wrong but she is still reprimanded for things that seem small when other characters do them.  She, a fifteen year old girl, is still held responsible for the irrational fears of adults that she's never met.  Her missteps could have dire consequences for her friends, family, and her dragon.  And yet they constantly get her name wrong, insult her culture, hair and cloths - but she's expected to grin and bear it.  

I've never had my parent's lives threatened. But I have lost jobs, friends, and  promotions because my behavior some how threatened my white female bosses.  I have been poorly trained for jobs in much the same Anequs was poorly prepared for the cultural exceptions of the school.  I knew how she felt when she said it felt like everyone expected me to already know the rules.   The problem with this is that you are not given grace for learning when you are a minority.  You not given a chance to figure it out.  

 

  When I was made an assistant manager at Sherwin-Williams my manager missed my first three weeks on the job.  She had a funeral that took up one week, then two weeks of paid vacation to grieve her loss.  When she came back she wrote me up for the mistakes I'd made in her absence.  In the end she wrote me up six times in four months.  She never talked to me about what I was doing wrong.  She never told me in the moment what mistakes I was making, but she told everyone else.  She created an environments of secrets and whispers and eye signals that everyone but me was privledged to.  When I finally, after four months of this, got mad about this and spoke she cringed and hid and cried that she thought I was going to hit her.  

    The General Manager came to our store to find out what the problem was with us.   She told him that I wasn't very well trained, which was funny because her husband was my training manager for the assistant manager program.  She told him  that she couldn't talk to me because she was afraid of me - but I promise that I was just as polite, well spoken, and straightforward as Anequs in this story.  When it was my turn to speak I told him of the environment that I'd been living in and he asked me why I felt that way. I said racism.  He stopped me mid-sentence and said that we don't use the "r" word here.  He asked me what should be done.  I asked to be moved to another store.  He agreed then demoted me from assistant manager back down to full-time employee of another store.  The official reason was that I could not handle the responsibilities of the job.    I kept my assistant-manager pay for three months then lost that too when the G.M. was promoted to Regional Manager.  My former manager faced no consequences even though it was well known that she'd treated her Hispanic assistant manager the same way.  

The microagressions and the straight-up aggressions that Anequs suffers in this story were real relatable.  Time and again I brought back to the above story, and others experiences I have dealing with majority races.   I hope every YA reader eventually finds this book and learns something about privilege and how manners can be a blindfold.  

Recommendations

If you like this book you might also enjoy the sequel: 

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 I'm Porsche B. Yeary and I’ll see you on the next page!