Review: Dragonmark by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Dragonmark by Sherrilyn Kenyon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I was so excited to get this after reading Dragonbane. I'm a long time Kenyon fan and I've read and own all of the Dark Hunter books.  I'm sorry to say I was sadly disappointed in Dragonmark, and that has never happened to me with a Kenyon book before

I will say if you haven't read Dragonbane and Son of No one this is actually a pretty decent read. The story flows well and it follows Kenyon's typical style and story construction. If you are a long time fan of the series and have read all the books, you'll likely be disappointed and somewhat irritated like myself.

After the cliffhanger in Dragonbane left us with, Illarion's story seemed so promising. I was so excited to learn more about him and see what happens after he is lured away by what appears to be the illusion of his dead wife.  After waiting for it, this book does not deliver as expected. It starts out well enough giving us the backstory of how our hero and heroine meet and their love story unfolds, but after 150 or so pages it of a 340ish page book it is almost a direct copy of chapters from either Son of No One or Dragonbane and we only find our main characters' resolution in the last 30 pages of the book. Kenyon is one of my favorite authors, and this is probably my favorite series but this one left me wanting and upset. She has never sacrificed the quality of her story before just to publish a book, it is something I've long admired about Kenyon. She's published many short stories/novellas in the series and I feel this one may have been better suited as one of those as there was only about 180 pages of new content and the rest came from the previous 2 books. This book is is almost as if she started writing Dragonmark and couldn't finish it or didn't have enough content so someone else finished it by taking content from the previous 2 books to finish it and fill it out. There were some plot holes that could have been explored, however Dragonmark was like re-reading Dragonbane and excerpts of Son of No one sometimes word for word. I hope that this one was just a dud and the next one in the series returns to the type of book I've come to expect and love from Sherrilyn Kenyon.  I'd rather read a great novella or wait longer for an even better novel, but don't give me half a book I've already read.  Long time Kenyon fans will wait patiently for Sherry to put something excellent out.

View all my reviews