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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9499856" data-attributes="member: 8461">I just finished reading I'm Afraid You've Got Dragons, by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_S._Beagle" target="_blank">Peter S. Beagle</a>, and I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing.Before I go further into that, though, I should mention that it's possible that some aspect of my critique doesn't hold up to the finished version. That's because the copy that I picked up from the bookseller has a notice on the corner of the cover that says "Advance Proof, Uncorrected - Not for Resale or Quotation." Given that the place I bought it from only receives books via donation, rather than purchasing them, someone clearly thought they were being clever by sidestepping that "resale" proviso (and of course, the bookseller didn't seem to care).With that said, presuming that this copy does look like the final version of the book (which came out in mid-May of this year), my quick take on this is that the first half of the book is better than the second half.I say that with some hesitation, because Beagle is a gifted enough writer that even his less-than-best passages still have quite a bit of narrative heft to them. While I'm not familiar with any of his other works, he has a way of making the omniscient narrator give insights and asides that are humorous (albeit quite restrained) in their irony, in a way that reminded me of a much more staid version of Douglas Adams.What lost me, at least in terms of considerations of quality between the first and second halves of the book, was the tone.While the prologue makes it clear that there's going to be drama ahead, the first half of the book seemingly puts that on the back-burner in favor of comedy. Not "laugh out loud" comedy, nor does it ever overshadow that there's dramatic elements simmering in the background, but all sorts of dry asides that abet some great characterizations. Indeed, multiple characters have instances of remarking (or having the narrator remark) on various aspects of their life that seem too on-the-nose not to earn a chuckle.Then the stakes are raised, the villains appears, and things stop being funny as the promised drama arrives...and I find myself wishing we could go back to the understated comedy.Part of my discontent is simply that the villain doesn't get nearly as much presentation as the characters do, and so feels more like a plot device than a purpose. Oh, he makes it clear what his angle is, going on more than once about why he does what he does, but it falls far short of the exposure that the rest of the cast got. More than that, several of the supporting cast members are minimized (almost to the point of near-total absence) in the latter half of the book (I particularly missed Montmain the valet, who seemed almost like the narrator's mouthpiece for how penetrating his insights were at times).More than that, the second half's presentation of the action was incredibly jilted. For every villain action the bad guy takes, he seems to spend three or four pages talking. Worse, the other characters talk back, interspersing fighting with long conversations in an awkward start-and-stop that feels jarring. This sort of thing works in comic books, where you can have a character present three or four speech balloon's worth of text in the middle of leaping at someone, but it doesn't work here.It also doesn't help that, for all the back-and-forth conversing that goes on, a bunch of magical things happen which are only sort of explained. Stuff happens, in between all the talking, but we're only sort of told what it is, let alone the why's and how's of it all. Beagle gives us enough that it's not completely frustrating, but it started to grate on me after a while.I won't say this is a bad book, because it's not, but I'd have enjoyed it a lot more if it had remained what it started out as, instead of turning into what it did.</blockquote>

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