Welcome to the Speculative Chic Book Club! Each month, we invite you to join us in reading a book that is voted on by YOU, our readers. Following a short review, please feel free to discuss the book in the comments!

Dragonsbane (1985)
Author: Barbara Hambly
Pages: 341 (paperback)
Publisher: Del Rey

Why I nominated this for book club: May is the month of moms, and I wanted to acknowledge that with books featuring maternal characters. I nominated a couple of different varieties of mom, and this one happened to be a biological mom.

Premise:

An idealistic young prince convinces an aging warrior and a struggling witch to help him kill the dragon that is terrorizing his kingdom

As a vicious dragon stalks the Southlands, Crown Prince Gareth ventures to the forbidding North in search of the only man who can kill it. He is Lord Aversin, the Dragonsbane, whose dragon-slaying days have won him renown across the land. But when Gareth finds Lord Aversin, he discovers the mighty hero is squat and bespectacled, the ruler of a mud-village who admits that he killed the dragon not with a lance, but with ignoble poison. Still, he’ll have to do.

Gareth and Aversin set off in company with Jenny Waynest, a witch with great ambitions but disappointingly puny powers—a ragtag crew destined to become legendary, or die in the attempt.

This ebook features an illustrated biography of Barbara Hambly, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

Spoilers, of course

Discussion:

Right off the bat I need to say that I really and truly loved this book. I was delighted by these imperfect characters and their imperfect lives and relationships. Jenny, who for ten years hasn’t been able to choose between her drive for power and her love for the family she made but doesn’t live with. John, the only living dragon killer who’d rather be ankle deep in mud talking about pigs than celebrating his heroic deeds. Gareth comes the closest to the cookie cut out of a fantasy prince but even he is pretty bad at being noble.

These characters are all my preciouses.

I loved the glimpses of Jenny’s life and her relationship to her children. The fun mom who comes into town and kisses and hugs them but doesn’t have to deal with their day-to-day.

Like puppies who tolerate a kennelkeeper’s superintendence, the boys displayed a dutiful affection toward John’s stout Aunt Jane, who cared for them and, she believed, kept them out of trouble while John was away looking after the lands in his charge and Jenny lived apart in her own house on the Fell, pursuing the solitudes of her art. But it was their father they recognized as their master, and their mother as their love. (Page 26)

Especially for 1985, I feel like this characterization of a woman in a fantasy novel, even one written by a woman, is almost revolutionary. And even though she does choose, at the end of the book, to go back to her family and back to being a human, the fact that she chose, for even a little bit, to abandon it all and pursue her power meant a lot to me as a reader.

John is the perfect anti-hero, from the moment we first meet him ankle deep in the mud to his spectacles to the time he attended dinner in court in his traveling mail.

Quietly, Gareth said, “Aversin—Lord John—I—I’m sorry. I didn’t understand about the Winterlands.” He looked up, his gray eyes tired and unhappy behind their cracked specs. “And I didn’t understand about you. I—I hated you, for not being what—what I thought you should be.” (Page 73)

And point of fact, he is the hero of his own tale. He did, in fact, slay a dragon. But that happened before this particular tale, and this particular tale is all Jenny’s. But I still love that John is who he is, that he doesn’t apologize for it, and yes, that his true passion is actually pig farming and making sure the people dependent on him survive the harsh winters.

Morkoleb was such a cool character too. The contrast between the dragon’s power and Jenny’s power as a mage was interesting and I really liked their connection. The ending reminded me of the ending of The Last Unicorn, which is a favorite book of mine.

It is a cruel gift you have given me, wizard woman, he said. For you have set me apart from my own and destroyed the pleasure of my old joys; my soul is marked with this love, though I do not understand what it is and, like you, I shall never be able to return to what I have been.

… Be happy, then, wizard woman, with this choice that you have made. I do not understand the reasons for it, for it is not a thing of dragons—but then neither, any longer, am I. (Page 340) (Editor’s note: the dragon “speaks” in italics)

And so we need to talk about the ending, because I feel like that could be the most divisive part of any discussion about this book. I liked that she became a dragon, and I liked that she returned to being a human. And more than that, I liked the reasons. That she recognized Zyerne’s quest for power and the dark and evil path that led her down, that she saw how that quest had twisted Zyerne, and how those choices were reflected in Jenny’s choices. I was ready to accept Jenny ending the book as a dragon, and I would have defended that choice, but I’m just as happy to see her choose love and her family instead. And I loved most that John gave her the space to make her own choice, that he didn’t try to influence her as he had done when he was younger, that Hambly showed how both of these characters had grown over their years together.

In conclusion: I loved the story and the characters and am actually super stoked that this seems to be the beginning of a series. I will definitely be checking out where this story goes.