Moonlight, please stay unchanged. Moonlight, I’m coming to meet you. Moonlight, run up and, definitely, moonlight, we will meet once more. Let’s sit beneath The Silver Moon Elm, by MaryJanice Davidson and Anthony Alongi.
Synopsis:
Scaly skin, family fights…it’s tough being a teenage dragon.
Jennifer was just starting to get comfortable in her own skin, scaly as it is. She should have known that, as half-weredragon, half-beaststalker, things don’t stay normal for too long…
Following through on a promise made to her mother, Jennifer agrees to go to Crescent Valley, where Jennifer and her father find refuge with other weredragons, and where they meet Xavier Longtail. Xavier, a powerful elder dragon, doesn’t believe in peaceful co-existence, and after he stirs up trouble in her family, Jennifer wonders if he isn’t right. She’s about to go nuts with all the fighting, when her ex, Skip, comes to her rescue and whisks her off to the movies, where she falls asleep…
Waking up, Jennifer finds her hometown overrun by weachnids, dangerous half-werewolves, half-spiders. Weredragons are long extinct…except for Jennifer, of course, and the ominous Xavier Longtail, and it’s up to them to return the universe to normal. Can they trust each other enough to pull it off-or are they the last of a dying breed?
Source: Goodreads
SPOILERS BELOW
We’re in uncharted territory, folks! Having passed the point where I stopped reading this series on my first attempt, I’m now experiencing the following books for the first time. And how does this one start off? With more of the terrible past mistakes of Jonathan Scales.
You remember how, last book, it turned out that Jennifer’s father once had the brilliant idea of throwing his illegitimate abomination-baby through a portal into a hell dimension? You probably thought that was only a one-time lapse of good judgement on his part. It’s a mistake anybody could make once, right? But no: turns out it was only one of a streak of very bad decisions on Jonathan Scales’s part. How did he follow it up? Well, this book reveals that his next no-so-bright idea was two murder two fellow were-dragons (the parents of one of Jessica’s present-day friends, for maximum angst), then tell his wife that he’d been cleared of wrongdoing by the dragon Blaze when in fact he’d avoided punishment by framing her for the crime. Way to go, Johnny-boy, keeping the streak alive.
Starting out this way did not make me super-enthused about the book. But, as it turned out, these opening chapters were not representative of the plot as a whole. Things soon took a hard left turn, with all that stuff about Jonathan’s stupid childhood decisions coming back to haunt the family being dropped in favor of a quartet of powerful werearachnid sorcerers casting a spell to alter reality so that beaststalkers and weredragons are nearly extinct and werearachnids rule the world. It then becomes your typical dark-alternate-timeline, set-right-what-once-went-wrong story where Jennifer has to team up with Evangelina to restore the world to its proper state. Which was overall much more entertaining.
So, this one had a weak lead-in, but ended up being decent. We’ll have to see where the series goes next.
Final Rating: 3/5
profmorbius 