RANTS AND RAMBLES
DISCLAIMER: When I review books, weaknesses and inconsistencies tend to dominate my discussion; therefore, I will emphasize that any particular rant (and, yes, they can be long-winded) does not have special bearing on my unified opinion of the book. For this, please refer to my overall star rating. Additionally, this review is my personal opinion, intended to help like-minded readers navigate the plethora of available options. Use it as a tool but do not assign undue importance to it (i.e. feel free to disagree with me).

• There are weapons in this book, so I must regale you with my obligatory rants about martial topics. Let it be known that I am not an expert in the use of swords, polearms, armor, or other medieval combat equipment. Nevertheless, I know enough about these topics to recognize a horrible representation when hear it. That being said, if you have information to which I am not privy which makes any of the following rants incorrect or irrelevant, please feel free to let me know.
• Bo staffs are introduced which is neat because they are a weapon often overlooked, but the book immediately mangles them by describing them as an old weapon with advantages, but “a sword is better.” Historical fact is that polearms, such as the spear, dominated battlefields due to several factors. They generally enjoyed a somewhat easier and cheaper production pipeline than something like a sword, though this may not have been true for all polearms like pikes or poleaxes which include more involved metal fixtures. More importantly, polearms enjoy a vast advantage over shorter weapons like swords due to their length. Other things being equal, a skilled combatant wielding a polearm can keep an opponent with a sword at bay, injure, or even kill them without ever coming within range of the sword’s blade. Staffs of any sort lack the advantage of a sharp metal tip like that of a spear, but they do maintain the many other advantages of a polearm, making them a viable counter against a shorter weapon like a sword. Of course, the instruction in this book provided for the staff include holding it in the middle (which negates the staff’s reach, it’s primary advantage) and swinging it behind the head to spin up an overhanded strike, thereby telegraphing the attack. If this is the way these sticks are used in this world, I can see why “a sword is better.”
• Literally days after their introduction to the bo staff and having not mastered it, the characters are introduced to swords. The training swords are metal instead of wood. This is a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, but I’ll focus on the most important ones. First, metal swords are much heavier than wood ones and therefore less useful in a training environment, particularly in the early stages. Yes, warriors will eventually need to get used to the weight of metal, but lighter wood counterparts are a much better way to teach the basics of sword play. And the basics of swordsmanship is where the real utility and deadliness of these weapons lie. Second, practicing with metal weapons introduces a whole host of problems pertaining to safety. The heavier weight and generally keener edges (even on blunted blades) offer a much higher likelihood of severe injury. Particularly with sharp blades, as these weapons apparently have, the chance of a major injury or death is astronomically high, especially with inexperienced individuals as in this book. Even with a magical healer on standby, the chances of an injury so severe it cannot be magically healed is huge. This exact thing happens mere pages later when a man gets his hand cut off and dies in graphic fashion.
• During sword training, one person strikes another in the chest while sparring. According to the book, the armor on his chest “prevented any injury from the strike, but had the fight been real, [the] strike would have been fatal.” Since no special armor was provided to the combatants prior to the session, I can only assume the armor mentioned was of the variety typically worn into battle (many of the trainees bring armor with them and wear it everywhere). In this universe, does armor only work in training fights? Does it suddenly lose its structural integrity upon entering a real battle? If so, why does anyone wear armor in the first place?
• In the third act, Lailani, a barely trained conscript, takes on a hoard of enemies in hand-to-hand combat. Ostensibly the enemy soldiers have even less training than she does (if that is possible) and are specifically described as fodder rather than warriors. Never-the-less it would take a very experienced warrior to stand up to this large of a crowd of even unarmed combatants. They would easily overrun Lailani due to the negligible skill she has at her disposal.
• MINOR SPOILER: Lailani lives on an island off the mainland which is a pretty small community. She is friends with two men on the island who are conscripted. She is a woman and therefore cannot be conscripted for fight, but she disguises herself as a man so she can go in her father’s place. At the training camp, conscripts are bunked three two a tent. By a massive stroke of coincidence, Lailani bunks with her two friends who absolutely do not recognize her. She has cut her hair, rubbed dirt on her face, wears men’s clothes, and speaks in a slightly lower voice, but how are these two people who grew up with her unable to tell almost immediately from her general look, sound, and mannerisms that she is their female friend from back home? This stretches the suspension of disbelief to its breaking point.
• SPOILERS: There is so much completely unnecessary redundancy in this book. Because the same material is retread time and time again, the pace feels glacial for most of the book despite the breakneck speed at which new themes are added (and subsequently discarded). One example of this repetition is when Lailani overhears a conversation from which she surmises that the bonding ceremony with the dragons will happen much earlier than expected. After this, her friends tell her there is a rumor that the bonding ceremony will happen sooner than expected. Sentences later, the commander tells the conscripts that the bonding ceremony will happen sooner than expected. Inexplicably, Lailani is shocked by this turn of events. Not only did the book manage to provide the same information to the main character three times, but she is still shocked by it. It is slow, sloppy, and absolutely groan-inducing.
• SPOILER: The dragon school master provides a warning to the conscripts prior to their dragon bonding “ceremony” (which is not a ceremony at all but simply them wandering through a dark cave until they find a dragon). The following lines are directly quoted from The Price of Honor (and are used in compliance with Fair Use legal requirements as I am using it in the form of criticism). “I offer you a warning: there are untamed dragons down there. If you choose one of them, they will fill your path with difficulty, but it is not an impossible road. You will not be able to discern them apart from the others except by their temperament, and by the time you experience their disposition, it will be too late to turn back.” So let me get this straight. The warning is that there are wild dragons, but picking one is not the end of the world and also, there’s no practical way to avoid them? Wild dragons also don’t factor into the story at all, so what, from either an in-world perspective or a boarder story-telling perspective, is the point of this? This sense of pointlessness nicely sums up the feeling I got from most actions, decisions, and dialogue across the entire novel.
• MINOR SPOILERS: This book clearly is intended for a young audience, so the amount of graphic violence and mature themes it contains are baffling. Violence includes: a person getting their hand cut off with blood squirting from the stump as they slowly die; Lailani’s leg being broken with a single punch; a brawling fight including several people being stabbed through the chest; Lailani being forced to kill her own dragon; Lailani being forced to execute 14 people by slicing their throats in graphic fashion; other generalized combat violence. Mature themes include: extreme sexism, the tyrannical rule of an emperor, the grey morality of politics, torture, murder, and more. None of this is appropriate for a young audience either by general standards of propriety nor by the ability of young minds to competently handle and understand the material. Nor does it add anything of significance to the story (see the next rant).
• MINOR SPOILERS: Any plot potential this book has is drowned in the sea of themes trotted across the pages at breakneck speed. The story attempts to cover topics from duty & honor, self-sacrifice, gumption, doing hard things, the morality of lying and stealing in dire circumstances, the grey morality of politics, problems with aristocracy, and many more. The sheer volume of issues crammed into less than fifty-thousand words means there is no time to develop any of them. They are all hollow, juvenile, and ultimately pointless. The story would have been much better served by focusing on a few topics and fleshing them out properly. Less would definitely have been more in this circumstance.