Dragonfold and Other Adventures
Tyrean Martinson
Wings of Light Publishing
Fiction, YA? Collection/Fantasy/Sci-Fi
Themes: Creative Power, Cross-Genre, Dragons, Girl Power, Religious Themes
**+
Description
A girl with a strange gift for origami, a one-armed soldier finds a reason to live, a young woman is sold into an interstellar army... these and other tales and poems unfold in this collection.
Review
This might have merited three or three and a half stars, but a few things held it down. First off, many of the stories felt incomplete. Some were actually excerpts from longer works - making this more of a sales pitch than a story collection - but even the stand-alones often left me wishing for closure of some sort, setting up larger arcs or conflicts and simply leaving them hang. The religious bias, even in alternate worlds (which would have no knowledge of the Christian God, let alone Christian songs), grew a little thick now and again, as well. I also found myself nonplussed with many of Martinson's poems. What was here, for the most part, read smoothly, without glaring editing errors or jumbled grammar or other issues. I liked one or two of the stories, and parts of a few others. I just felt annoyed with the overall lack of resolution, not to mention the excerpt-heavy selection. (If I'd wanted to read incomplete previews, I would've used the "Look Inside!" option on Amazon.)