Summary: A middle ages fantasy version of How I Met Your Mother.
Kevin J Anderson is one of those authors that seems to produce a superhuman amount of books. He has published 120 book according to his bio. Many of them are part of established worlds, Dune, Star Wars, X-Files, etc. I have not read any of those books.
But I did really like his Saga of the Seven Suns series (or most of it.) It was a good space opera series that got a little bogged down with too many story lines in the middle of the series, but it was still quite enjoyable.
I ran across Dragon Business when I saw that Anderson is starting a new trilogy set in the same world as Saga of the Seven Suns. The Dragon Business was an Amazon Prime book so I could borrow it for free.
The first line of the description is, “King Cullin may be known as “the Dragon Slayer”, but he fears his son’s legacy will be as “King Maurice Who Speaks with Proper Grammar”.” This is a book with very modern sensibilities, in the vein of the movie A Knight’s Tale. Early in the book, the father is trying to tell the son a story and the son complains about the father switching between first and third person and omniscient narration. It was pretty funny. And there is a good theme of wanting a child to be everything you couldn’t be, but still wanting them to be well grounded and appreciate the things you appreciated.
I really wanted to love it, but it was only ok. The early humor wasn’t really sustainable once the story started moving. And the main narrative about the father’s early years, while fine, was nothing special.
About half way through the book it turned into an episode of How I Met Your Mother, with this kid that is supposed to be really smart (and 13) not knowing his mother’s actual name, so the father can tell him several stories about girls he met without the kid knowing which one was his mother. (Spoiler alert: we never actually figure out which one is the mother because the father doesn’t want to spoil his ability to tell stories in the future.)
In the end this felt like a side project that Anderson wrote for the heck of it, but didn’t actually put enough time into to make it work.
The Dragon Business Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook