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Review: #324
Title: Garden of the Purple Dragon
Series: Dragonkeeper - 1st book
Author: Carole Wilkinson
Read Before: no
My Comments: Ultimately, Garden of the Purple Dragon is an interesting and good book. The beginning could be said as being a bit boring, but I like to think of it as passively telling the story. I liked following Ping’s (the main character) day to day life, living secluded from everything, caring for a baby dragon. It made the change to her imperial position more striking. In the first two-thirds of the book, you feel like that there is no antagonist, and that the book is really just chronicling Ping’s life. However, after this first section (in which, I’m afraid, many people would have given up reading it long before reaching that stage), the plot gets more intricate and sucks you in until the end. It presents questions in which you want to know the answer to. There was a part where you feel such deep sympathy for Ping. If you hadn’t journeyed with Ping for that long, you wouldn’t have felt the same pain and injustice, the author had done a wonderful job there. A criticism would be that I was somewhat against the author using the Chinese pinyin terms of length since it made it more confusing. I also didn't like her saying numbers in forms like “ten and hundred” or “twice times ten”, just say “110” or “twenty”. Don’t make it complicated; it broke the flow of the story. While there were some annoying characters (Kai, I’m looking at you), it's a worthwhile book to read, purely for the emotional impact.
Rating:
6.5/10