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Okay, from the beginning, I have questions that are never answered. It’s part of a setup that is fine in it’s own right, but you do have to wonder at the biology.

Teku is a fifth child. Which doesn’t seem like it should be odd, but it is here. In this village, every…one is paired. The particular focus family has a mother and father, and two sets of twins. This is normal. And then they also have Teku, who is not.

This is odd enough that I was wondering if the inhabitants were even human, since there’s not a lot of early description, but yes, they are.

Of course, four kids per two parents is a pretty good population growth rate… if child mortality is very low. It sounds like that’s not a major problem, but we don’t see enough to have any idea.

All of this is really just important for the first chapter, as it is part of the initial equilibrium setup. From here we quickly get into (literal) transformative fantasy, which is the backbone of the story.

The second unexplained bit is the character’s sudden transformation from male human to female dragon. There’s at least some hints of unknown forces operating for this part, which at least makes it feel less ignored, and that maybe there’s an answer that the characters (and reader) don’t get to know. This a fairly obvious allusion to wish fulfillment for being transgender, including a renaming of the main character to Blaze. She struggles with the change in status for the rest of the story… but outside of that it generally isn’t a problem. Unique? Yes. But it obviously happened, and therefore there’s no point in tying themselves, or Blaze, up in knots about it.

So, this is man vs self, but instead of struggling with a choice or essential nature, it is a struggle to accept her own self-worth. (It’s kind of in the vein of the classic Andre Norton trope of a misfit finding their place in the world elsewhere, but with less struggle, and more spontaneous transformation.) External plot meanwhile is generated by the fact that dragons are in charge of ensuring magic—which is needed for life—flows through the land properly, and everything remains growing. Blaze’s old village should have been dead, but magic was flowing until just now, causing things to come full circle as the characters go back to investigate for a conclusion that has no plot twists whatsoever. (And it’s said that once an area is dead, you can’t just bring it back by re-establishing the life stream there. So, what took care of the world before the dragons took over?)

The general writing is good, and if you stay concentrated on what’s going on through Ember’s eyes, it’s a decent enough story. It’s not trying to be great, which is good, because the various unanswered questions hold it back already. If the description sounds interesting, go ahead and get it; it is by no means bad, it just has some problems that in the end don’t interfere with the story.

It took six years for the final volume of this trilogy to come out, and given the page count takes another two-hundred page jump upwards, I imagine it was in the category of ‘the book that ate his life’.

The longer page count is put to good use as the plot continues to evolve and become more complicated now. We have three well-formed major plot lines: Clay and Doto continue their quest to figure out what has gone wrong with the world, and how to contain Ogya. Laughing Dog falls further under the sway of Ogya while convinced he’s still in control and fights the forest that recently has become so especially deadly. And Cloud is dealing with having stepped into a leadership role she had refused so long as she guides the exiles of the People of the Savanna away from the forest and Ogya.

Clay and Doto remain isolated from the rest of the plot for much of this book, while the last two plot lines continue to resonate with each other, and Cloud’s journey throws off more sub-plots and a new major viewpoint character. The major character growth is here too; Clay and Doto have worked through their major issues (though by no means all of them) by now, so the engine of character development is largely left to Cloud and Mirage, and much of the action is dominated by the journey of the exiles. And it is very well handled.

Needless to say, Campbell has stuck the landing, and even though the series began quite well, it finishes better than it started. It’s much more complicated than the series began, which probably accounts for the time as well as the length.