Warning: This review contains major spoilers for Bitterwood (Book 1 of the Bitterwood Trilogy).
Stop reading now if you don’t want to know what happened in Bitterwood.
Dragonforge by James Maxey
Book 2 of the Bitterwood Trilogy
What It’s About
The old dragon king is dead, and his dream of human genocide is dead with him. The new king dreams of a better world where all the sentient races can live together in a just society, but this dream is not without opponents. A prominent human prophet sees the old king’s death as the perfect time to start an uprising to reclaim human independence, and events get even more out of hand when a group of devotees frees the old king’s brother, known as the Murder God, from prison.
Why I Like It
Much like Bitterwood, the best part of Dragonforge is the ever-shifting conflict. Many of the characters from the first book return in this one, along with several new ones, and all of them still have interesting and overlapping goals. It’s a thrilling ride when the plot starts rolling downhill to the climax because there are so many important players and it feels like almost anything can happen.
The world gets much more fleshed out in Dragonforge than it did in Bitterwood. In the first book it always seemed a little odd to me that the humans could fall so far, from their current dominance of the Earth to being basically serfs in a medieval feudal society. That fall makes a lot more sense in this book, which works in some of the backstory of what happened and makes it more plausible.
There are also some great character arcs in Dragonforge. I don’t want to give anything away, but there is one character in particular that I enjoyed. This character was fairly static in the first book, but goes through a dramatic transformation in this book. The transformation makes sense as it’s happening, but I definitely didn’t see it coming.
What I Don’t Like
The pacing of the last half of the book is a little strange. The plot thread that seems to me like the most important one, the one with the highest stakes, gets resolved before the climax even really gets going. There are also several times when the viewpoint is inconsistent, where characters’ internal thoughts are interrupted by a voice that just sounds like an all-knowing narrator trying to fill you in on details from the first book.
The Bottom Line
Dragonforge keeps the “anything could happen next” feel of the first book, and adds some more interesting character arcs and a more fleshed out world on top of it. It’s a good sequel, so if you’ve read Bitterwood and enjoyed it, don’t hesitate to pick up Dragonforge.
What Do You Think?
Have you read Dragonforge? Leave a comment below and let us know what you thought of it!
