Domesticating Dragons

By: Dan Koboldt

Narrated by: Austin Rising

Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins

Publisher's summary

Build-a-Bear Workshop meets Jurassic Park when a newly graduated genetic engineer goes to work for a company that aims to produce custom-made dragons

Noah Parker, a newly minted PhD, is thrilled to land a dream job at Reptilian Corp., the hottest tech company in the American Southwest. He's eager to put his genetic engineering expertise to use designing new lines of Reptilian's feature product: living, breathing dragons.

Although highly specialized dragons have been used for industrial purposes for years, Reptilian is desperate to crack the general retail market. By creating a dragon that can be the perfect family pet, Reptilian hopes to put a dragon into every home.

While Noah's research may help Reptilian create truly domesticated dragons, Noah has a secret goal. With his access to the company's equipment and resources, Noah plans to slip changes into the dragons' genetic code, bending the company's products to another purpose entirely....

©2021 Dan Koboldt (P)2021 Tantor

Suspense and humor and dragons!

Likable characters. Realistic issues and failures, some of which were humorous as they would be in real life. The tech support calls are hilarious but you can imagine people making those calls. Will look for more from this author.

Customer service at its best!

Chapter 25 makes this book worth every penny!!

Overall it was a great book but anyone that has ever worked call/chat support needs this book for that chapter alone! The story was great on a whole and as always Austin did a great job, he was the perfect person for the tone of this book.

Worthwhile

Good and engaging story but the writing leaves somewhat to be desired. The performance was excellent.

I laughed, I cried, I wet my pants.

Dan Koboldt has become one of my top ten favorite authors with this one nook. He joins Heinlein and Piper along with Niven, Ringo and Sterling. A real fun book.

Guy named "Koboldt" writing about dragons? Sus.

Entertaining the whole way through. Austin Rising sounded a bit stiff at the start of the book but seemed to get a lot more comfortable a few chapters in. Dan's genetics expertise certainly comes through in the subject matter. He definitely knows what he's talking about.
A fun look at corporate genetic engineering hell, my only criticism being it felt like Parker crossed a moral event horizon a couple of times with nothing really coming of it, which soured me a bit on him as a character.

Exciting novel!

Love the storyline and the ending, a good small piece for relaxation. A story of dragon blew my mind as an Asian

Report not a novel.

The book has issues that make it a real struggle to get through. It's a book about dragons so reasonable suspension of disbelief is expected but there is so much that just shows the author never googled basic things that would still be the same even if dragons exist.

For instance one of the first things we are told on page 1 or 2 is about a sprawling expansive headquarters that must cost a fortune to irrigate.... That's only 20,000 square feet. A few pages later we learn this facility is big enough to house live animals... But only 20,000 square feet.

There are descriptions of how a super fantastic company that engineers dragons works and yet anyone who works in an office will realize that isn't how any successful company operates.

The main reason I'm giving up and returning is the show vs tell problem. There are excerpts where we break from the story and get insights into the past and background but these all read (and are literally read by the narrator) as if book reports - this thing happened and then that thing happened and it matters because facts which I will now recite in detail

This issue is compounded by a narrator that doesn't seem to really understand the characters he's voicing (in fairness I don't get them either) and he then reads a report like a report. I wanted to like this but it's not a novel. I truly don't understand the laughed and cried comments. This left me feeling nothing but irritation at a great premise wasted....maybe that's why they cried?

Not for me

The last half started to feel like a Tesla advert with a tech bro dude. He took every opportunity to tell us he ate meat and was smart. His love interest was just "so badass" cuz she drove a jeep and wore hiking boots. Cmon.