Book Review: The Dragon Collector by D.K. Drake

Goodreads Summary: Ready to escape earth and travel to a different dimension, one where dragons exist and people live for hundreds of years? 

Then pick up this book and enter the Land of Zandador, part of the dimension God created after the flood to preserve the animals who wouldn't be able to survive earth's post-flood atmosphere. Dawn, Dusk, Noon, and Midnight Dragon Stalkers roam the land, and the loyalty of the dragons lies with the humans who control them: Collectors, Hunters, Protectors, or Destroyers. These four factions are the Dragon Stalker Bloodlines. This book begins the Saga of the Bloodline Heroes. 

Javan is one of those heroes from the Collector Bloodline. 

But having grown up on earth, the ordinary, lanky teenage boy knows nothing of his heritage, and his biggest dream in life is to impress a girl by playing football. Until he is whisked away to the Land of Zandador. 

Here he is no ordinary boy. Here the fate of a nation and all dragons rest on his shoulders. Here he must learn how to ride Dragon Stalkers and unite the four Bloodlines in order to overthrow the Dark King, free the people of Zandador, and save the Dragon Stalkers from extinction. 

The Dragon Collector's quest begins when he learns of his heritage and must quickly gain the skills he needs to collect his first dragon...or his long-lost mother is doomed to die at the hand of the Dark King in the Land of Zandador.

Goodreads Rating: 4 stars with 52 ratings

Genre Listing: Fantasy, Young Adult

Goodreads Challenge: 36/50

2019 Reading Challenge: #19 A book about Dragons ( find the challenge here)

Book Review:

So, for those of you who don't know, I have this odd book acquiring the habit of just going to Amazon to the Kindle Book section, sorting price by low to high and just downloading whatever Free Book that sounds interesting. This started back in the early days of the blog and was reading 3 or 4 books a week. I don't do it as often because of Kindle Unlimited.  Anyways, A couple of months ago I randomly downloaded a bunch of freebies again and this is one of them. A lot of times the books I find this way aren't all that great. Some are decent. Even fewer are gems. I would put this one as a rare gem.

The Dragon Collector by D.K. Drake is a short fantasy novel at about 220 pages. It follows Javan and his quest to learn about his heritage and becoming a Dragon Collector after living apart of his family for his entire life. The story moves kind of fast. Readers are presented with Javan's birth and his being whisked away to safety, a memory from when he's 7 or 8, and then the story really starts once he's 15.  At that point, he's introduced to Zandador and it's Dragons.

I found myself being immediately sucked into the world that D.K has created. It has a really good foundation, and the story is told well in the few amounts of pages. It doesn't need to be- but I could see this being expanded out as a larger fantasy epic. The world and the creation of Zandador was something that I found really fascinating. I felt that there was a lot of thought that went into the creation of the world, how it came to be and lining it up with Earth's creation per the Bible. I thought it gave Dragone-lore a different take.

The collecting of each Dragon made me think of Pokemon, and I couldn't unthink it. Anytime the book talked about collection my brain went straight to "Gotta Catch 'em all!" This really has nothing to do with the book, just where my mindset was when reading it. I was actually amused that each of the Dragons has their own personality. A lot of work really went into the development of the dragons. each type had their own fears and when they would hunt. Each group had its own power and scale color. It was really interesting.

There were a couple of things that ultimately kept this from being a five for me. Because of how short the book is the character growth is very abrupt. Essentially, on one page Javan is a whiny little kid and then within a page or two, he all of the sudden understands what's at stake. I think had it been a smidge longer the growth could have been transitioned more smoothly. Also the use of 'thus' and 'necessarily' because a little distracting. After a while, it started to stick out and the words didn't feel like they belonged. It's not a huge deal, just something that bugged me.

Overall, I really enjoyed the story and was pleasantly surprised. I never really expect much when I go into these freebies that I find, but it was well written and a good story. The story is pretty clean and could probably be easily read by tweens. (Not a parent, just giving thoughts.)  I'll probably take a look at the 2nd book later on.