Two Flowers for the Dragon 3

I like this series more and more every time I read it.  It’s a subtle kind of fondness, not a fanatacism, but I like the quiet romance and the equal amounts of time spent on all three of the main characters.

In this volume, we unexpectedly find out about Shakuya’s father.  I… did not see the result coming, not at all, so let me not spoil it for you.  We do run into Lucien’s sword instructor randomly while Shakuya is on assignment, and she’s the one that sort of acts as the… learning… tool… for us finding out about Shakuya’s father.  She reveals her hand in an extremely unexpected way, and I’m still trying to get over what it was that she showed.

We also find out that Shakuya has an additional source of power, which I thought was a pretty interesting idea, and I thought the way it was concealed was also pretty clever, if a bit creepy.

The stuff about Shakuya’s father was sort of a bonus, the actual plot of the volume carried over from last time where Shakuya and company travel to an oasis to help them manage their water (or something).  The group finds that the oasis is being assaulted by unrelenting sandstorms, and Shakuya tries to get to the bottom of it when she realizes that the sandstorms are an unnatural occurrence.

Both Lucien and Kuwan stick around for the entire volume, so Shakuya doesn’t get much alone time with either.  There’s a pretty dramatic scene with Kuwan towards the end of the volume that is extremely out-of-character for him, but still much appreciated.  For all the romantic triangles going on, there hasn’t been too much romance as of yet.  There are also still many mysteries surrounding Lucien as to his memories and how it was he wound up disappearing, but I’m beginning to suspect Kuwan’s adopted father.  Nothing even hints at this in the volume, but I suspect as much anyway.

The characters are developing quite slowly and nicely, and I’m still waiting to see Shakuya’s tattoos grow.  It’s a bit lighter and more comedic, maybe a little less intense, but I think a lot of the same people who read Apothecarius Argentum would also enjoy this series.  It’s just a fun read, and I enjoy it immensely.

This was an ARC provided by CMX.  I felt stupid reading it because I had read Astro Boy just before this, and Astro Boy is a left-to-right book, so when I shifted to the (unbound) ARC, I couldn’t make sense of it and was trying to figure out if I had dropped it and shuffled the pages around or something.  It took me, like, 20 minutes to figure out I was reading it backwards.