I first read King’s Dragon, the opening book in Kate Elliott’s seven-volume epic fantasy sequence Crown of Stars, in the same year I started secondary school.
Returning to it after an interval of (give or take) thirteen years, I find an immense difference between my reactions as a thirteen-going-on-fourteen year old, and my reactions now, as an adult with more context for the genre. King’s Dragon is a novel very much in conversation with its predecessors and peers. It’s interesting to see it now as a very close contemporary of A Game of Thrones, in dialogue with so many of the same things—though due to the nature of publishing, while King’s Dragon succeeded A Game of Thrones chronologically, it’s impossible that the one could have influenced the other.
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