Dragons And Dwarves [Mass Market Paperback]

This is an omnibus version that includes the two novels The Dragons of the Cuyahuga and The Dwarves of Whiskey Island. I'm currently reading The Dwarves of Whiskey Island and will update this with that review once that book is finished. But here's the review of The Dragons of the Cuyahoga:

The Dragons of the Cuyahoga is the first book by S. Andrew Swann featuring newspaper reporter Kline Maxwell, who usually covers the political beat in Cleveland, OH, never the "fuzzy gnome" stories. What are the "fuzzy gnome" stories? Well, the main premise behind this book and the sequel is that a Portal has opened up in Cleveland and elves, dragons, mages, gnomes, and every other assorted fantasyland creature have tumbled through an inhabited the area around Cleveland. They're limited in how far they can roam by the magical field that surrounds the Portal, but it's still a significant amount of area.

I picked the book up because of the premise, but I went into the book with some doubts. It's very difficult to integrate magic into the real world believable, but I think S. Andrew Swann has done it. There are limits on the magic and the way it is described and how it is used is interesting. There has been a lot of thought put into how something like the Portal would fit into our world, not just the mechanics of it and how it works, but also how it would affect politics and government and such.

The book has two great strengths, and that's one of them. The second is that the elves and dragons and such aren't just humans with funny ears or wings. S. Andrew Swann had gone the extra mile and made them all THINK differently.

The story begins when Kline is assigned to the "fuzzy gnome" story of a dragon that crash lands in the Cuyahoga. Except after a while it becomes obvious that it wasn't an accident, but murder. Most of the outcome of the story revolves around the fact that the fantasyland creatures think differently and that Kline has to adjust his own thinking in order to fit all of the pieces of the puzzle together so that they make sense. He keeps assigning human motivations and motivators to the elves and dragons and such, and he has to kick that habit in order to get the mystery of the dragon's death solved. This idea--that the fantasy creatures don't think the same as we do--is something that should be integrated into fantasy novels more, but it's hard to pull off, mostly because it's hard for us (the human author and human reader) to wrap our head around how someone so completely different will think so completely different. In the end, though, you can follow how S. Andrew Swann's creatures think and who killed the dragon and why--and why those who help Kline, help him, and those who don't, don't.

There are some drawbacks to the novel. I'm not sure what happened, but this book appears to have skipped the last page proof phase. There are alot of typos and sentences gone wrong and such. I don't usually mind some throughout my books, because as a writer I know that it's nearly impossible to find them all, even when three or four people go through the book specifically looking for them. But the number that appear in this book is insane and it got annoying. There was also a few sections of the book where I thought the worldbuilding detail of how the Portal was integrated into Cleveland was a little too much. This happened most often when the author spent a page or two explaining the "history" of a particular section of Cleveland--how such-and-such area went from new-wealth to a slum housing the lesser classes of fantasyland creatures, for example. I don't mind a paragraph on this, but when it went on for a few pages . . .

In the end, though, I thought it was a cool idea and I really liked the way the mystery resolved itself, since it was based on how everyone thought and that not everything had the same goals as, say, humans would have. I'll certainly go on to read the sequel, The Dwarves of Whiskey Island. In fact, I've already started it. *grin*

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The Dwarves of Whiskey Island is the second book in the Cleveland Portal series from S. Andrew Swann. I've read and reviewed the first book as well (The Dragons of the Cuyahoga) but the series is set up so that each book can be read individually. You don't need anything from the first book to follow or understand this second one.

And the second one is better than the first in my opinion. The first has it's interesting points, because the world he created--one in which Cleveland is suddenly inundated by dragons, elves, dwarves, etc because a portal to their world opens up in the middle of the city--was new and unique. Part of the problem with a series like this is that the second book can't rely on that "trick" to keep the readers reading. There has to be something new.

And there is in this. We still have the main character, Kline Maxwell, working for the newspaper and getting involved in the "fuzzy gnome" stories he hates when all he wants to cover is politics. In the first book, he gets assigned a "fuzzy gnome" story and the politics come in afterwards. In this one, he starts with politics and the "fuzzy gnome" gets interwoven into that. This time, it's dwarves. When they first came through the portal, no one knew what to do with them, so they were sent to the salt mines (where the magic was so high that no humans could live) and with the help of Mazurich, a politician, they became essential to the survival of the city after the portal by taking over construction projects and such.

And then Mazurich kills himself . . . and no one knows why. Kline receives a phone call that sends him search of the answers and leads him to the dwarves . . . and something much, much worse that threatens not only Cleveland, but his family as well.

I liked this book better because the writing felt . . . smoother. It was easier to read and the case itself flowed more naturally out of Kline's real job as a reporter on politics. Another reason I liked both this book and the previous one was become S. Andrew Swann is adept at giving you more and more information about the story without actually giving the real point/plot away. He sets all the cards on the table for Kline (and essentially us) and yet they still don't quite make sense until he reveals what's REALLY going on at the end. And then it makes perfect sense and you wonder why you didn't see it earlier. I also liked how this story got more personal for Kline. In the first book, it was just him against everything else. In this one, it gets personal, threatening his family, so in the end he's not doing this to save himself or to get the story for the paper. This personal stake in the outcome makes the book much more tense and dramatic.

I had some issues with the ultimate bad guys in the book, but I think my issues are more personal than anything else. I can't really say anything more about this without ruining part of the plot of the book. Suffice it to say that I wish S. Andrew Swann had chosen something a little new and different for the Big Evil. Don't get me wrong, he does do something different things with this Big Evil, but the Evil itself . . . he had an entire portal full of anything he wanted, so I wished he'd come up with something different.

But as I said, a good story. It has me wondering if he's going to do any more stories in the Cleveland Portal series. I hope he does.

I ordered this book as a bit of a crap-shoot, fully prepared to be disappointed. I was pleasantly surprised. Billed as a supernatural mystery it does fairly well in living up to that billing. Granted, it's in no way a truly complex mystery and there is a little bit of plot wandering, but all in all it's a decent attempt at intertwining the urban fantasy and mystery genres. Hard core mystery readers may be a bit put out by the lack of complex plot twists however; to wit, there's a lot that's mysterious but not a lot that's actually a logically solvable mystery. There's enough magic interwoven into the two books that urban fantasy fans will probably be satisfied.

My omission of the 5th star was due to the fact that the books, while technically adept, are at times somewhat less than engaging. They're not BORING -- just, not spectacular all the time. That being said it's still quite worth the money, especially considering you do get both Dragons of the Cuyahoga and The Dwarves of Whiskey Island included herein. I myself found the first volume far more appealing, but both are worth your time.

› Go to Amazon.com to see both reviews  4.0 out of 5 stars