True, some scenes sparkle while others fall flat, but the reader will still want to know what happens.

The strangest thing about The Last Dragon is that in spite of its patchwork construction, it still works. Erbrow, the dragon, is delightful, if a tad predictable, as is Robi, a clever orphan girl.

By the end, he does get a grip and his character grows up. Yorsh is one of the most annoying characters I have ever encountered, and I wonder why his traveling companions didn't stuff him down a rabbit hole. One minute, for example, the humor is dry and subtle and next Yorsh is up to his armpits in guano and fewmets. There are a number of subplots twisting through, and the narrative is uneven because the tone changes in so many ways. Yorsh must raise it and train it and ultimately save the land from the vicious and greedy tyrant who rules it. That would be the hatchling the dragon leaves behind. In the second part, years have passed and Yorsh finds that the feeble dragon with whom he has been living is not, in fact, the last dragon. He also stumbles across a prophecy that indicates he should find the last dragon, which he does. Yorsh, whose full name is one of those long unpronounceable strings of letters some authors find amusing, has a disarming way of doing or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, leading to a series of less than agreeable adventures. The rains have flooded out all of the areas where elves were forced to live, and he is the last elf left. In the beginning, Yorsh, a very young elf, is making his way through a nearly drowned world. The difficulty with this quirky fantasy novel translated from the Italian is that its author hasn't quite decided whether it's a satire of the fantasy genre or a fantasy that takes itself entirely too seriously. Look for the VOYA review on this B&N page. Only one out of a few professional review sources agrees with me that this is a very message-heavy tale dressed in a fake fantasy clothing, and the humor is often crude and unfitting for the tragic tone of the underlying tale. If I hadn’t had to read it for a group discussion - I would have probably dropped the book midstream. I cannot imagine that it is the device of the translator, but a slight possibility remains. It annoys me to read the compulsive “listing of stuff” (yes, I realized that it was intended to represent how the Elf and the Dragon would think and organize their inner worlds) page after page: what kind of books there are in the library (many kinds and you’re sure to be told a FULL page of the various subjects or how readers should think of anyone or any event (it’s never just one descriptor, almost as if the author cannot make up her mind how to describe a character or an emotion, but a “list” of adjectives.

I have not that much good to say about this book. Author: Silvana De Mari translated by Shaun Whiteside

The last elf silvana de mari