Spine of the Dragon

Wake the Dragon, Book 1

By: Kevin J. Anderson

Narrated by: Fleet Cooper

Length: 25 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's Summary

New York Times best-selling author Kevin J. Anderson triumphantly returns to epic fantasy with the Wake the Dragon series. Spine of the Dragon is a politically charged adventure of swords, sorcery, vengeance, and the rise of sleeping giants. 

Two continents at war, the Three Kingdoms and Ishara, are divided by past bloodshed. When an outside threat arises - the reawakening of a powerful ancient race that wants to remake the world - the two warring nations must somehow set aside generational hatreds and form an alliance to fight their true enemy.

©2019 WordFire, Inc. (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

Evil Wins Because Good Is Dumb

It hardly counts as a spoiler. You see it coming from a mile away. It's so painfully obvious that the big disappointment is the massive case of plot induced blindness going around.

If your personal elite guards are incapable of stopping a malnourished orphan girl from entering a secured building, and you make no efforts to correct this problem, you deserve to be assassinated.
If you're so oblivious to the goings on in your kingdom that several of your lords can conspire with your personal bodyguard to continuously and actively thwart your foreign policy while commit crimes against humanity...you don't deserve to rule.

I get that it's "Book 1" but an entire book of waiting for people to get killed by their obviously murderous political rivals or mad obsessed traitorous bodyguards is a bit much. I can only wonder "why haven't you killed him" so often. Seriously, one of these guys should have been executed in his second scene for high treason, but we get treated to watching him build up an assassin force for a whole book, while presumably the elite guards are painting their nails, to the point that he can decide without much notice to off the monarch. She deserves to be dead. Don't know if she is. I gave up when cute orphan girl responded to the assassination before the captain of the guard.

An adventure in a sprawling fantasy world begins!

I remember visiting a book store years ago and finding Hidden Empire, the first book of The Saga of Seven Suns, by chance, probably because Anderson is near the beginning of the alphabet. I recognized the Kevin J. Anderson as the author of several Star Wars books I had read previously and decided to give it a shot. And so I was sucked into a sprawling sci-fi epic that eventually spanned ten books, a graphic novel, and more.

Spine of the Dragon is like that, but set in a sprawling fantasy world instead. Think of an epic scale along the lines of The Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire. Anderson takes you around the world he has created, visiting different kingdoms on different continents, meeting rulers, warriors, orphans, scholars, and mysterious civilizations long thought dead. Over the course of the hundred-plus chapters you'll find a little bit of everything. Each chapter moves to the perspective of a different character, allowing you to see all of the events taking place in the world from different perspectives. There will be love and hate, sorrow and anger, incest and intrigue, politics and battles - something for everyone to be sure.

If there's any criticism to be found, it's that the ending is quite the cliffhanger. Of course Anderson is already working on the sequel, and based on his track record with his two sci-fi sagas, we should only have to wait a year or so before the next book arrives. (I'm trying really hard to not make a comparison to a certain other series that I mentioned earlier.)

I thoroughly enjoyed the start to this new trilogy, and look forward to seeing what sort of adventure we're in for in the coming books. I heartily recommend it to any fan of fantasy and epic storytelling!

Tedious and predictable

Awful. Utterly unoriginal and predictable. Moves at a snails pace. Way too many points of view. Just not good

Much much better than his Sci Fi

I read both iterations of his Sci fi cycles, and I can't deny they had merit. That said, I only read those because of his great Star Wars novels.

In any case, he uses the same POV trope of his Eldar (pardon if I forget the fire/ice/tree space opera name, and sans Google, I'll give it Eldar because I remember it as such) novels, but the actual characters and story is so much better, gripping, and worth going though. I was just as annoyed going from character to character, but in this case, it's because I actually cared about them.

Worth the credit? Absolutely, no question asked. Not sure id purchase it, but I only use credits.

Good story, poor performance.

I have enjoyed reading Kevin J Anderson’s other works, but this is one rare time that I purchased the audible version without the kindle book to go with it. Mistake. I hate to say it, but the audio book sounds as though it is being read to a children.

Great Fantasy Story.....Overeager Narrator

Story is really good, but the narrator is a little over dramatic for my tastes. Will certainly purchase book 2, "Vengewar".

Narrator ruined this story for me.

I tried to give this narrator a chance and listened several hours into the story before coming to a place where I couldn’t stand it any longer.

He has a fine clear voice. It’s just that his delivery was way too melodramatic. He either spoke with a sneer or a whine or simper and there was no break from it. I just could t take it any longer to see if there was anything worth continuing to listen to. It’s a shame. This author might have a decent book here, but I’ll never know because of the choice of narrator. Does an author have any say in the narrators choice? I wish he had chosen differently if he did.

Great story line. Too bad about the narration

The story is everything. So true and so flawed if the narration is sub-par. I kept waiting to get used to the narration, but couldn't get past the awkward pauses and too-structured reading. I get the publisher's desire to be "high fantasy" but this time it backfired. I am a big fan of Kevin, so will pivot to Kindle, but won't finish the audio book.

narator sucked

the narrator put the emphasis on the wrong words. l struggled to finish this book

mediocre plot, strange narration

plot was subpar and narrator used same weird voice for all of the female characters. Very meek and high pitched and annoying.

Potential, maybe... by awful narration.

No Audible. No!

Four hours in, I had to stop. The narration accents were so shockingly awful it was upsetting, I actually shouted at it!
Dick Van Dyke was better in Mary Poppins, and that joke has been earning comedians good money for half a century!.

So it was time for this accent abused listener to give up. Four hours I won't ever get back.

Please Amazon, Audible or whoever does these things, remember there are British people listening. It really is offensive to have our badly perceived, national accents liquidised (Yes, it's got an "s"!) into multinational mush.

Had it been simply read in the Narrator's own, quite pleasing voice, without the accents and quite absurd crescendoes, it might have been a different story...

How do I get my money back?

Unbelievably bad narration

The story seems kind of dense and twisty, but I've no idea if it's any good due to THE WORST narration I've ever heard. Every character has an accent that is 50% generic, borderline offensive Middle-Eastern and 50% randomly chosen Welsh, Irish, Australian, Jamaican, all mangled beyond any saving. A credit totally wasted.

Amazing

The story was greate and the build up face could not have been done better. The parallels of the continents and their characters is mind blowing.