Chinese Dragons by R.A. Montgomery
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
“The room where you sleep is small and cramped. In one corner is stored the sacks of seeds needed for planting. There are not as many sacks as usual and your uncle and his wife are worried.”
OH MY GOD SO BORING! Who starts an adventure book for kids like that? “In the struggle to feed a family, commodities like seeds had to be carefully portioned out and rationed.”
This is called Chinese Dragons. I want to see some dragons. Or at the very least, martial arts masters who are referred to as dragons. I don’t think that’s asking a lot.
Because I needed a reason to push through, I decided to challenge myself. Not to survive or get a good ending, but to see how long this book would last. If I made it to 15 minutes, I’d count it a victory. If it was less than that, failure.
Ready. Set. Go.
56 Seconds: Well, I got out of goddamn bed. That’s a start, I guess.
3 min 36 seconds: I haven’t made any choices yet. And just to confirm, it sucked to be a Chinese farm kid whose parents are dead, especially if your cousins are a bunch of assholes.
4 min 10 seconds: I made a choice! Probably a bad one. I kind of had to decide if I was going to watch a battle or work in a field. I’m dying here. 5 minutes and all that’s happened is I got out of bed and heard how crappy my life is? Let’s cut to the chase, here. If this was one of the race car books, I would’ve been in a fatal but exciting crash long before now.
4 min 53 seconds: Ugh, now some asshole is offering me a job. Leave me alone! I want to get to the battle! No, I don’t want security assisting some pot painter, a bright future away from my uncle’s house. I want a damn battle. Where are the dragons?
6 min 31 seconds: I’m waiting in line to sign up for the army. For 45 minutes. This is ridiculous, like it was designed to torture me. The text ACTUALLY SAYS that I wait in line for 45 minutes. Wow. Choose your own adventure. How long will YOU wait in line? 45 minutes? 32 minutes? Choose and find out!
7 min 20 seconds: “You decide to stay with the army. 3 months later, you are a trained soldier..” Time is so fucking elastic in this story I can’t even.
7 min 46 seconds: And as I’m walking around, having never spotted the enemy, I get shot in the chest with an arrow and die immediately.
Now, on the plus, I’m in the afterlife, and my dad makes a little joke like “You didn’t even see him coming, eh?” Thanks, jerk. But like I said, on the plus, I’m in the afterlife, and my dad is pretty pumped about that.
On the minus, I made it about half the goal time.
And what the hell, R.A. Montgomery? I do almost nothing, and then an arrow hits me out of fucking nowhere and I’m just dead? That’s cheap, man. I read all your nonsense about grain and farming and blah diddy blah, and then you skip right over my warrior training, which was probably awesome, and just go straight to my death. How did I not get to fight anyone? How was there no “If you swing your sword high, go to page 42. If you swing low, go to page 77”?
Death truly stalks us all in these damn books. Even with a lower standard of “Winning” I couldn’t make it. Damn, Damn Damn.