“The Bone Raiders” by Jackson Ford

This was disappointing, I’m sorry to say.

I picked it up because I really enjoyed The Girl Who Could Move Sh!t With Her Mind, and hope to get to the sequels one of these days. 

My complaint about this book is that, if you’re going to write a book about a band of raider-warrior-nomad-women riding around on giant fire-breathing dragon-dinosaur things, the one thing your book CANNOT be is boring. You need to lean into the Rule of Cool and have your raider-warrior-nomad-women riding their giant fire-breathing dragon-dinosaur things as much as possible doing awesome things as much as possible.

The premise of this book put it firmly in the same territory as Michael Bay movies. If I go see a Michael Bay movie, I’m not expecting high cinema or profound commentary on the human condition. I’m expecting a few hours’ entertainment filled with robots and explosions.

Now, this isn’t to say that the book is bad or ill-planned. The premise here is that the people who live on the same grasslands as the titular Bone Raiders are being ordered by the ruling Khan to go live in his capital of Karakorum - minor complaint: if you’re making a fantasy universe, don’t take names from the real world. It breaks the immersion - leaving the Bone Raiders with no one to raid. The youngest of them, after an attempted raid that went FUBAR in no small part due to the unexpected of one of these giant fire-breathing dragon-dinosaur things. She gets the bright idea that they could challenge the Khan if they were all riding these things, and we’re off to the Plot.

So far so good. Where things get bogged down is that Ford spent way too long dealing with the fact that training a wild animal to let you ride it is hard.

Sure, it’s realistic and well-thought-out. But that doesn’t mean it’s fun to read, when I’m primed for lots and lots of action and am not getting it.

Maybe this is just an expectations thing, and if I’d been expecting something more sedate I wouldn’t have been so annoyed it. I will say the climax was very well done - it just took me forever to get to it because I simply wasn’t interested in reading it. It’s a problem regardless.