(Review by Jane Beaumont, Cape Town, South Africa)

OK already, this book is nearly 20 years old but my library only just got it (rotten fantasy budget allocations!) so I only just read it!

I do fancy dragons - from McCaffrey's legions to Roberta McEvoy's one-off to my current favourites as conceived by Robin Hobb.

Well, Ms Yolan does a very nice dragon although not topnotch on personality and has a refreshing look at draconian telepathy. Unfortunately I have a personal antipathy to names with masses of 'k's in them as it slows down my reading by forcing me to attempt mental pronunciation every couple of words and all but one or two humans in this book are k-infested. Happily Yolan's dragon's have nice simple names like Heart's Blood and Blood Brother and the names are all organised along the same lines as those of racehorses so it's nice and easy to work out lineage.

The story is straightforward but nicely written and the planet - Austar IV - is credibly although swiftly drawn.

The dragons themselves would probably speak in Sylvester Stallone or Bruce Willis rather than Sean Connery tones. They are fighters, not thinkers but none the less for that and top notch on strategy, were they a smidgeon more oriental and one might think Jackie Chan. The main human protagonist is your fairly typical young upstart who makes good via a fairly tough rite of passage - in this case raising and training a stolen dragon - but he is engaging whilst some of the lesser characters have been drawn in great and memorable detail.

Cover notes tell us that Yolan was planning a whole slew of Austar IV dragon books but this seems to be the only one (unless my poor library is cranking up to acquire some unknown others for the 3rd millennium?) and I have not seen her books in the bookshops either. A shame if this one was a one-off, for she seems a talented writer with a good dollop of originality attached to her imagination lobe.