Leighton's Blog

Wow, long title.

Anyway, here is day two of the CSFF Blog Tour, a review of Starlighter, by Bryan Davis.

To the right, you may notice a picture of Bryan Davis. I placed that (erm… him) there because it would be a bit redundant to put the cover of starlighter there for a second day in a row.

About the cover (look to previous post) I am not quite sure that Zondervan did the best cover they could have. The dragon egg is interesting, if not a bit plain, the girl behind looks photoshopped and the dragon above looks REALLY photoshopped. Ahh, well. An author can’t have everything, I guess. (ok, so I’m biased, being an artist myself)

At least the dragon logo thing behind “Dragons of Starlight” is good.

Today, I am going to cover the topics that I missed yesterday. You may have noticed, I said NOTHING of:

• The antagonists, except a minor mention of overlord dragons.
• The plotline.
• The purpose. (as interpreted by me)

So, there you go. To start things out right, lets have some organization:

The Antagonists

The Dragons Of Starlight	Headed by Magnar they are on a dying planet bereft of Pheterone, also known as Extane, a gas breathed by Dragons, fatal to humans when inhaled in excess. They force the humans to serve them and mine the gas from subterranean pockets. Koren’s master Arxad is a nicer, almost “human” dragon. The evil Maximus, guard of The Basilica  is not one to tell stories to.
Zena	I thought I would give slight mention to this character. Zena is a former human slave (I guess) who has been changed to a zombie basically by the evil (or so is my opinion) black dragon egg she serves. She is not very nice. Period.
Governor Prescott	Although he meets his just end in the book, he is a lying sneak who DESPERATELY wants to join forces with the dragons and (so I assume) sell the humans as slaves thus benefiting himself. He has kept his portal finding hobby quite secret and outlawed any pursuit of it by others. He has the litmus finger (don’t ask) embedded in his chest but it glows an unimpressive yellow color. (wimp) Fortunately he is assassinated by some other bad guys who cut the litmus finger out of his chest and stupidly give it to Jason Masters thus allowing him to find the portal without them.

The Plotline

The basic plotline is a quest to rescue the slaves on Starlight and bring peace to dragon-kind. There are some weird twists throughout the story as well as some hints of an underlying evil plan hatched by the unpredictable Magnar.

He is very old and was the first and only dragon to capture humans and bring them to Starlight to work. He was stopped by Uriel Blackstone who blocked the portal. Few have found or penetrated it since then. The only one’s who did were Jason’s two older brothers Adrian and Frederic. Frederic disappeared and was thought dead, but Adrian and Jason know better.

They have a cryptic message sent in a genetically activated courier tube from Frederic that explains why he’s been missing so long. He somehow made it to Starlight and has been plotting and lurking there while waiting for the others. Adrian leaves near the beginning and (supposedly) arrives there as well.

We don’t see them again in book one.

The Purpose

Hmm. This one is hard to decipher.

I had trouble seeing any specific purpose in the plot or anything. There were some “Pro-Life” comments and/or sentiments. That was good.

The book was slightly more on the suggestive side in some parts and definetely not for small children. I really just have to say I couldn’t tell what message it was trying to carry. It very well may have had many different messages but no DEFINITE and obvious one.

Bryan, can you enlighten me? Anything you were trying to get through to this generation through your fiction?