The Dragon Mage Series, Books 4-6

By: Scott Baron

Narrated by: Gary Bennett

Length: 28 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

A magic wielding astronaut fighting off an alien invasion with his dragon friend? Charlie thought they might actually pull it off...that is if Lady Luck decided to play nice for a change. Unfortunately, knowing his fortunes, the odds of that were slim to none.

The continuing adventures of Charlie and his friends.

Books 4-6 of the Dragon Mage series:

Magic Man Charlie

Star Fighter Charlie

Portal Thief Charlie

©2019 Scott Baron (P)2020 Scott Baron

Adding to the story with interesting twists

Enjoyable additions to the basic plots. This series of three books does an enjoyable job of making the other characters better developed.

Great story

Page turner! Very happy with the adventures of Charlie and how he handles day to day

Bundle review

Book 4: Good story, but poor pacing. Felt like a quarter of the book could have been skipped. A little too much slice of life for the typical tempo of the book
Book 5: 4.5 there was a section that was painfully long to get through. Otherwise, still enjoying the progression fantasy. Hopefully they'll get to explore and explain some of their new capabilities before adding on more
Book 6: Best of the trio, but scattered. Not sure how I feel about the tie in to the other series. Still more unexplained power ups that aren't explained.

On par for the authors universe

I'm reviewing mid book 4, thus early, because it is so typical. I expected the story to be a little better, since it is the fourth book and the pattern is that it starts out very, very bad and gradually gets better until the last book ends, but the fourth feels like a mini reset. It starts out bad and stays bad more than half the book.

Edit: Now half way through book 5, same trashy extended boredom for the beginning of the book. The most obvious solution I thought of half way through book 4 was their solution. Why!? Why did it take four fifths of the book wasted with negative events that were inconsequential and mostly better just being skipped over to get to an ending that could have been in chapter 20?

Though this is a talented author, he really should try to improve on the pattern of making the boring setup last way too long. So much of the story is explaining just how bad the situation or scenario is for the main characters, plus killing off people who are already scarce because of the last war. The story becomes all the more unbelievable (the bad kind) when there is always more bad stuff coming for the foremost majority of the story and the protagonists miraculously win without any real moral principle or true intelligence explaining how or why.

I rate the story relatively high because the narrator deserves it and some people might get a thrill at being bored and depressed through most of the story only to end well. That is a thing - like a happy ending thriller, but for a typical fantasy sci-fi story. It's not my thing, since the mood and flow of the story is so obviously artificial and hard to get engaged with. After thousands of books, I keep reading because this author is better than most. I just have to skip to the next chapter once I have the main idea of the current one and the story becomes more interesting. That is not an option for much of my work with my hands not free.

The creativity is wonderful

I love this story because it keeps you engaged and pushes the boundaries of what you think the characters are capable of. Very much ready to start the next set of books.

Do not buy

The first three books were not very good and somehow the author regressed with the next three.

Better than NyQuil

Puts you to sleep quickly. Took me a while to finish it. The narrator didn’t help either.

Gifted Audible Code (Reddit) - Asked to review

I was gifted the Audible Code for this series on the /r/fantasy sub and asked to review after finishing.

My review as such is this:

Not my cup of tea. I did not care for the soft wimpy voice of the narrator. It just made everything seem so blasé.

I did not read the first 3 in the series either, but it didn't affect the outcome of my displeasure with the writing or narration.

It mostly seemed long for the sake of being lots of chapters. Very little progression that made sense to me, more of a rambling sci-fi adventure than a coherent Fantasy Epic. Dragon flies into the sun! Ooooh! Aaaaah!

I do not recommend this book to anyone in particular unless boring aliens, cyborgs and dragons excite you beyond reason.

Would I read the first 3 books in the series or continue listening to books 7-9? No. No, I would not.