Catch Here, There Be Dragons (The Chronicles Of The Imaginarium Geographica, #1) By James A. Owen File Ebook

edition to the head of the line it goes!

This book started out well and I was immediately interested, The characters are interesting and the story begins to roll along laying out the basic idea and the overriding theme, Unfortunately it's not long before the book bogs down, . . I suppose overwhelmed by it's own "wonder",

I know that some love this these books, I can even see why, I know there are readers who will be totally enamored by the very things that finally caused the book to fall out of my "good books" possibly a double meaning there.
I think it might be said of this book and my reaction to it that I just "missed the magic", In the end I wasn't sucked into the "feel" of the book, There came a time in the book about when they reached the Keep of Time he said mysteriously being careful not to reveal more than the name lest there be a spoiler that I knew I was fading out.
When you're reading a book and your mind keeps wandering off to what you plan to read next, when you should start dinner, or whether you've checked the mail today or not, something's wrong.


I suspect many of you will find the setting and the idea behind the book familiar, It has been done before, You'll also recognize the characters or at least who they're supposed to be as you come across them, though they've been played fast and loose with at timesupdate a couple of years after the original review Oops.
"played fast and loose with" I seem to have attempted murder on my "grammar" there, sorry, I got through the book, but I skipped forward several times, The author is doing his best to bring you into his world and get you to "know" his characters, Unfortunately this often devolves into long, pointless conversations that sometimes attempt to move beyond plot exposition into "cuteness" and humor, Too often however they manage to only be slow, boring, or even silly and annoying,

I suppose I should look at this as a youth book and accept that as the reason for the above, but I see no reason to talk down to YA readers

The above is of course as always only my opinion.
I know many liked this book and it's sequels greatly, I however do not, I didn't get into this volume, was glad to see it end and don't plan to follow it up, If it's a book you like I'm happy for you, please enjoy, Not for me however. I didn't hate it, mostly I was only left cold and bored by it, I thought the beginning was a really neat idea but it just became too cliche, After reading some reviews I decided it wasnt worth pushing through, Two for awesome book design,

A rainy night in London,

Three young strangers, who all happen to be Oxford men, meet in police custody, They were all rumored to be students of the ancientlanguages professor who was found murdered in his study earlier that night,

Our POV character for most of the book goes by John, He is home from the War at the moment, but suffers debilitating flashbacks of the trenches, John was married recently, but thinks about his wife exactly once in the entire book, He also claims to have been a lazy student,

He finds himself stuck with Charles, a sarcastic fussbudget who wears glasses, and Jack, whos a bit younger and has the reasoning ability of the average hammerhead shark.
When the police question them and realize that none of the three could have been the killer or known about the attack, the three youths retreat to a private club where Charles has admittance.
The club is onB Baker Street, which will tell you a lot about what kind of story were in for,

No sooner have they settled in when a strangelydressed man with a funny mustache bursts in and tells them that theyre being hunted by evil fantastical creatures.
The creatures want the mysterious atlas that the dead professor bequeathed to John,

The strangerBertbrings the three lads aboard his oldfashioned ship, the Indigo Dragon, and they sail from London right into another world: the socalled Archipelago of Dreams, where all myths are trueand the people are entangled in a dynastic struggle.


Content Advisory
Violence: The professor at the beginning gets his throat cut, There is a big battle with apparently no notable casualties, except a character whom the author expects us to care about who gets blown up with a grenade.
No gore to speak of,

Sex: In one exceptionally contrived scene, when the travelers have escaped the wreck of their ship and wash ashore upon an island, a male character and a female character wake up tangled suggestively in each others limbs.
She extracts herself from him, embarrassed, and he informs her that she “looks good in wet clothes, ”

Language: A few minor swears such as “hell,” “damn,” and “bloody, ”

Substance Abuse: Some beerdrinking, Nobody gets hammered.

Nightmare Fuel: The Winter King captures the faun crew of the Indigo Dragon and feeds them to his crew.
Not shown, thank Aslan. I will be ranting about this later,

The Archipelago of Dead Trends
Here, There Be Dragons was recommended to me ages ago by two former friends from my homeschool group, one of whom blurted out the twist, which is the only thing that made me want to read it anyway.
With some books, the journey matters more than the destination the question is not so much how it ends as how it reaches that point,

Unfortunately, the twist is much, much cooler than the book that contains it, and the three historical figures involved deserved better,

WARNING: HERE, THERE BE SPOILERS,



Okay, thats not the actual first sentence, but it might as well be.
The book is a mass of clichés and “things that were popular at the time it was published”,

I can practically hear Owens agent and/or editors: “Everybody loved the Lord of the Rings, so write a book with a young Tolkien as the main character.
Disneys making a Narnia movie, so Lewis should be in it too, Throw in Charles Williamsno one knows who he is, so youll look smart for writing him in, and everything needs three main characters anyway, just look at Harry Potter! That Pirates of the Caribbean movie made a mint, so throw in some cool ships, plenty of meaningless McGuffins, and a female lead who communicates solely by pouting and yelling.
And that book by the homeschooled boy that all the kids likeAragorn Eragon Yeah, make sure there are plenty of dragons in it.
”



Irony: the book sets out to pay tribute to timeless fantasy and winds up being so dated its laughable, All its missing is a Hot Topic exclusive concept album featuring the immortal stylings of Metro Station and Tokio Hotel,

If theres one thing the Inklings never were, that thing would be “trendy, ”

And Tolkien, for one, was never a fan of combining disparate genres, He didnt enjoy his friend Lewis Narnia books because Tolkien found the combination of high fantasy and Victorian kidlit tropes offensive on an aesthetic level, High Kings and Dryads and powerhungry Sorceress Queens did not belong in the same story with talking beavers who eat toast with marmalade and use a sewing machine, Tollers insisted.
Its okay for the lofty and noble Elves of Imladris or Lórien to coexist with fourfoottall, hairyfooted humanoids who have names like Bungo Baggins and eat eleven meals a day, but Eldar preserve us from a faun who carries an umbrella.


That said, Tolkiens persnickety method made Middleearth the most believable, tangible fantasy world of all time, Every detail is consistent. None of Lewis worldsneither the space realms of Malacandra and Perelandra nor Narnia and the surrounding landshave anywhere near the same level of work put in.
Thats not to say at all that Lewis was an inferior writer or creator, he just lacked Tolkiens attention span, and he felt that variety was more important than consistency.


If the patchwork nature of Narnia irked Tolkien, the universe of Star Wars would have given him migraines, Once Upon a Time would have nauseated him, and Here, There Be Dragonsmight well have given the poor man a coronary.
Which Owens would have known had he bothered to extend his research beyond a Google search about his characters,

Realms of Inaccuracies
Historical fictionor historical fantasy, in this caseis made or broken by its fidelity to the people and place it purports to be about.
There are numerous errors in this book that prove that Owens knows very little about his subject matter,

. As far as I know, Tolkien never went by “John, ” His friends and colleagues called him “Tollers,” but that nickname might have given away the whole premise, so I dont blame Owens for not using it.
Tolkiens family

called him Ronald, Ronald or Ron would have been fine for the purposes of the story,

. The physical description of Jackfidgety and fairhairedcould have described Tolkien at this time, but never Lewis, Tollers stood” at his tallest, and was always slim and quiet, In his youth, he had blond hair, Jack was” and always sturdy stout in his older years, with a booming voice, gregarious mannerisms, a ruddy complexion, and black hair,

. Not only was Jack a bit bigger and much louder than his friend, he was an extrovert, who always said exactly what he thought and was interested in pretty much everything.
Tollers was an introvert, who considered his words carefully before saying them aloud in a low voice, and who had a narrow range of interests that he dove deeply into and become an expert on.
The two certainly balanced, and arguably needed, each otherand allowing for the conceit of this story, Tolkien would indeed make a better guardian of a powerful magical artifact.
But the de facto leader of the group would probably have wound up being the charismatic and accessible Jack, The Inklings sprang up around him, The portrayal of him in this bookas an immature twerp with a head full of bad ideasis frankly insulting,

. Tolkien was madly in love with his wife Edith and wrote to her constantly during their courtship and his army service after their marriage, Had he gone on a magical adventure, he would have missed her terribly and written her reams of letters, She was only his muse and the inspiration for Lúthien Tinúviel, after all,

. There is no hint here of the unspoken rivalry between Tolkien and Williams, The two men greatly admired each others work, but Tollers secretly found Charles a little too occultminded, He worried that Charles might be a bad influence on Lewis Tollers had successfully prompted Jack to convert to Christianity, and hoped to convince him to accept Roman Catholicism.
He was afraid that Williams would mess up that plan,

. Dragons were never a good sign in Inkling books, In Tolkien, they could project sophistication, but were ultimately wicked, stupid, overgrown worms, In Lewis, they were either slinking about in the background, or you might get transmogrified into one to be cured of your selfishness and greed, In Middleearth, Narnia, or any of the planetary realms, the image of a dragon flying in to save the day would be patently absurd, As previously mentioned, friendly dragons were the in thing at the time of publication, but they dont belong in the Inklings Origin Story,

Samaranth is set up not unlike Smaug, smug and threatening and happy to chat, but the book expects us to believe hes a good guy.
He and his pals here fulfill the plot function of Tolkiens Eagles, which, knowing how Tolkien and his compatriots felt about dragons, is all kinds of wrong.
It makes me seriously wonder if Owens actually read any of these mens books,

. Owens treatment of fauns is equally outofsync with his sources, None of them are given lines or names, and it appears that they communicate mostly in goatish screeching and may not even be capable of speech.
When the Indigo Dragon is boarded by the Winter King, he collects the fauns who make up the crew, and they are never seen again.
Aven says that the poor creatures will be fed to the WKs army of discount Ringwraiths, The heroes are only mildly alarmed at this declaration,

This is not true to the origins of fauns/satyrs in classical mythology, which tells of many individuals who were distinct persons, such as Silenus or Marsyas.
They might have done most of their thinking with their hormones, but they still qualified as people,

And its highly untrue to the Lewis character of Mr, Tumnus, the storyteller, the scarfwearer, the sardineeater, the bookcollector, the traitor who redeemed himself, who forged such a beautiful friendship with the little girl whom he met by the lamppost.
Im aghast that Owens considers Tumnus a subhuman creature whos good for nothing but cheap labor and bargainbrand Nazgûl food,



”I Am No Man”
There are more problems with the book, most of them named Aven Wells, She has nothing in common with any Inkling heroine, and could not have logically inspired any of them, We need an Éowyn or a Susan Pevensie here, not a knockoff of the Keira Knightley character from Pirates who somehow manages to be even more irritating than the original.


Elizabeth Swann might have pouted and hollered her way through the whole adventure, but at least she didnt spit every time she finished a sentence.
She was also pretty smartthis supposedly sheltered aristocrat turned out to be a natural at doublecrossing and outmaneuvering pirates, And while none of the other women around her were on par with Jane Eyre or Aerin Dragonkiller, they were fairly cool, especially Captain Anamaria, a minor but memorable character played by Zoe Saldana who disappeared after the first installment for some reason.
Also, at least they existed,



Aven would be much less annoying if she were not the only womanor even female creaturein the entire story, As previously stated, Elizabeth was not the only woman in the Piratesverse, and even the Inheritance Cycle, which I consider the male nerd gaze run amok, had a few interesting female characters to balance out the horrid Arya.
There was Angela the fortune teller, Elva the cursed little girl, and of course Saphira the formidable dragon, All these dragons flying about in this book and none of them is specified as female,

Again, this doesnt work as an Inklings origin story because powerful and terrifying women are easy to find in Inklings books, on either side of the good and evil divide.
Shouldnt there be a pseudoGaladriel or pseudoJadis to inspire our heroes Shouldnt there be girls on this adventuregirls like Éowyn and Susan and Aravis and Jill Why not bring Dorothy Sayers or Joy Davidman Gresham along, were playing fast and loose with Inkling history anyway.
AND WHY DOES “JOHN” NEVER WRITE TO, OR EVEN THINK ABOUT, EDITH!

Even at the very end, when the boys see all the famous writer signatures in the atlas endpapers, all the writers are male save Mary Shelley.
At first I thought they had to be fantasy writers, but nope, If Dickens and Twain qualified, theres no reason for Austen, the Brontës, Gaskell and Eliot not to,

Accidental Racism
Its also a little weird that both villains in the book look Asian, and dress like medieval Mongolians or wear Chinese robes, when all the good guys are extremely European in origin.


Its even weirder because the main villain is an Arthurian character, and therefore should be as Anglo as they come,

Granted, theres a little accidental racism in some of the Narnia books, and some would argue its even present in The Lord of the Rings.
But it is important to note that those books were written in thes and earlys, in a time when white people were just beginning to realize that other cultures were just as respectable as their own Western legacy.
These authors were not intentionally disparaging other cultures, And Lewis should get credit for Shasta/Cor and Aravis, who might well be the first interracial pairing in the history of YA fiction,

That said, there was no excuse for this type of thing in, It was a bad look in Piratesthat shot of Captain Jack Sparrow running along the beach is priceless, but he doesnt need to be being chased by cannibals.
And its a bad look here,

And a Fangirl Gripe
This is the leader of Tolkiens goblins, He is called the Great Goblin,



This is a Goblin King,



Know the difference,

Conclusions
Here, There Be Dragons is a very silly book that managed to make timeless writers dated, and has no understanding of its own subject matter.
Its sole saving grace are the illustrations and fonts, which are very aesthetically pleasing, But the novel itself is pompous fluff that has not aged well, Read if you want something ridiculous to laugh at, but not recommended for sincere enjoyment, .