Dragon Airways
Year: 2016
Author: Brian Rathbone
Length: 202 pages

***THIS BOOK WAS RECEIVED FROM A GOODREADS GIVEAWAY***

A book filled with equal parts fantasy and steampunk, Dragon Airways delivers on the promise of flying the skies on the back of a dragon. Brian Rathbone does an expert job of fusing diesel engines and magic stones in this exciting story. Not only is the setting interesting, but most of the characters are quite engaging as well. Because of this, Dragon Airways was a pleasure to read, and I voraciously read every page that was available to me.

While I did thoroughly enjoy reading this book, there were a few things that made it a little difficult to follow along. First, some of the minor characters weren’t that well-developed (or non-existent after the first few chapters), which made it difficult to know who they were, especially when some of them had multiple names and titles assigned to them. Secondly, I minimally understood the layout of the world Rathbone created, but there was so much travel between locations that I had trouble placing where these characters were and how close they were to spots they had already been (a map might have been nice). Now, I will grant that these two issues are probably a consequence of the fantasy genre, but I would have appreciated a little more clarity.

There were a few points during the plot where I did wonder, “what happened to ‘so-and-so’?” After the introductory chapters, the prime focus is on the handful of main characters as they travel around and engage in the war effort. These other characters aren’t reintroduced until the end, and the story comes to a satisfying conclusion. Part of me wanted little updates on these interesting side-characters, but I understand how the momentum of a story can dictate the flow and pacing.

An incredible story that might be hard to follow in spots, I give Dragon Airways 4.0 stars out of 5.