Critique: Icefire (Chris D’Lacey)

The plot is nice and simple. Its main purpose is to be the scaffolding on which the world building and character introductions rest upon.

 

*****SPOILERS*****

 

There are a few plot points worth mentioning. Like the special dragons being alive (Gwyneth puts a spell on David to let him see and communicate with the dragons).

Some details are of particular importance later on in the series but are almost unnecessary towards this plot. Dr Bergstrom shows David a tornaq, a narwhal-tusk talisman of the Inuit. Plus the dragon Gawain died on an island called the Tooth of Ragnar. Bonnington drinks some of the melted icewater.

Liz keeps a snowball in the freezer. This is the icefire, used to animate her pottery dragons into special dragons.

When a dragon dies, it becomes clay to be one with the Earth and their fire tear returns to the Earth’s core. If a fire tear cannot return, the dragon becomes stone.

Aunty Gwyneth arrives with her potions dragon Gretel. Gretel is my favourite character in the entire series.

Zanna ‘quickens’ the egg which then glows. Inside is a human baby with a dragon tail. But Gwilanna makes it a dragon. Strangely, he (Grockle) is bronze when the rest of Liz-made dragons are green.

Guinevere was meant to give Gwillana (Gwyneth!) Gawain’s fire tear in exchange for a child made of clay, hair and scale, a child called Gwendolen. Instead Guinevere returned the tear to Gaia into the sea. The firetear became polar ice and this turned Guinevere’s friendly bear Thoran into the first polar bear.

 

There were a few good bits that really stood out.

To the Inuit, stories are like well-chewed bones, passed mouth to mouth so that the flavour is shared and remembered.

There were two descriptions in particular which really stood out. One was when a snowflake melts, it’s described as ‘the crystals turned to tears.’ The second was describing Liz’s sleep as ‘deeper than quicksand.’ Comparing sleep to something physical like quicksand was really creative.

The decision to use ‘Mizz’ instead of ‘Ms’ was clever considering the intended audience.

Zanna’s sister says that David has fifty-three seconds and ends with thirty-eight seconds, a difference of twenty-five seconds. I counted the gap and it was exactly twenty-five seconds.

 

As always there was a plethora of funny asides.

David asks Zanna if she shook Bergstrom’s talisman. Such a naughty joke for a children’s book. They’d just read it as an innocent question which just racks up the hilarity.

There are may one-liners. Zanna says a car is ‘more convenient than a broomstick’. David wonders if Aunty Gwyneth ‘might not be an aunty or a Gwyneth.’ Gretel covers a no smoking sign with ash. David says he needs to ‘save Henry’s bacon’ which had me laughing because Henry’s surname is ‘Bacon’.

When Liz tells David to go to his room, he says he’s not a little boy, shoves Lucy and stomps to his room. So he acts like a little boy. That was funny.

At the publishing house, Dilys asks if geography is about maps and contours. Then it says David was ‘mapping the contours of her swinging hips.’

David sings loudly out of tune because he’s in love, Liz explains to Lucy. Her daughter declares ”I wish he’d be in love in tune.”’ This is my favourite line from the book and is the first thing I remember when I see or hear about this series.

 

There were a few issues that should have been cleaned up by the editors.

            For example, one paragraph was a page and a half long. This length is too far for books aimed at any age, let alone children. Then there’s one unusually large chapter at twenty-five pages. None of the other chapters even approach this size so it just felt inconsistent.

A semi-colon is used in a really bizarre way when David thinks, ‘But she was; very funny.’ There’s no grammatical reason for the semi-colon to be there. In actual fact, there’s no grammatical reason for any punctuation mark to be there.

In the same paragraph, have “David speech.” David prose. “Lucy speech.”

Something weird happen to the punctuation when Liz tells Lucy to ‘stop calling… Zanna, was it? a witch.’ It makes no sense. The ellipses should be replaced with a dash and the another dash should be put after the question mark to close the clause.

 

It’s almost unbelievable how many plot errors occurred. Unfortunately these mistakes lowered my affection towards this story.

Liz hoots only to have David hoot two pages later. If you’re going to use the same action, at least spread it out a bit more. The only time this closeness could be tolerated is if the same word was used to indicate a parallel but that’s not the case here.

David only pays attention to Zanna calling him handsome the second time. He didn’t even react a tiny bit to the first time.

David’s convinced that there ‘had to be’ a connection between dragons, bears and Gawain’s hidden firetear. He doesn’t have enough information to even suspect this, let alone be convinced by it.

Gwilanna spells David to see and speak with dragons. Yet, David’s confused that Zanna knows about the egg. Why would Gwilanna’s spell remove all the memories about Zanna and the egg?

When the icefire snowball melts, the dragons are out of action. All accept G’reth because he was made without the icefire. But icefire is the thing that animates the dragons so if Golly didn’t have any, how could he be animated?

David thinks Gretel’s inviting him to sniff her flowers, so he does. Even though he suspects Aunty Gwyneth of being bad so why would he do what her dragon wanted?

Zanna kisses David, even though he’s said plenty of times that he has a girlfriend. He wonders if he two-timed Sophie but considering he didn’t initiate the kiss I don’t know why he’d even wonder this.

Before David moves next door, David puts Gadzooks in the cupboard. Last time he moved Gadzooks from the window, the dragon cried his fire tear. Why would he risk that again?

Zanna says, ‘A white albino.’ Being white is literally the very thing that makes something an albino.

They had one hour until Gwilanna would do something awful. A short conversation later on they only have thirteen minutes left!

            David almost kills Gwilanna. This came out of the blue. I know she tried to kill him but wanting to kill is an extreme reaction from someone who’s so far shown no violent tendencies.

            Liz prevents David from killing Gwilanna because Liz and her descendants require Gwilanna to reproduce. Considering Zanna quickened the egg, Gwilanna isn’t necessary to Liz anymore.

The polar bear Lorel tries to prove that he’s fierce, ‘not a simple-minded Teller of Ways.’ Lorel has an amazing memory and logical reasoning so that’s hardly simple-minded. Plus simply acting fierce makes one appear like they have no intelligence. That is, simple-minded.

David tells Gretel to tell Zanna that he wasn’t two-timing her. But David mentioned more than once that he was with Sophie, meaning David and Zanna were never a thing. They were only a thing when they kissed and that counted towards David two-timing Sophie, not Zanna.

Bergstrom set the essay that was due that Friday yet David did his at the weekend?

In the first book, there were distinct references to Grace not being a special dragon. Yet in this book onwards, Gretel is a special dragon. This is a glaring inconsistency.

 

How did the fire tear become ice? It’s never stated which is such a disappointment considering it’s so central to both plot and worldbuilding. My theory? Fire is in water, so when Gawain became stone, i.e. solid, his firetear became solid, and solid water is ice.

 

In this book, we see a massive amount of world building and character introductions. It provides most of the information needed to understand the plot in future books. Whilst this is always interesting, it did at times feel like an information dump. This book is the stepping stone between the first book, with hints of magic, and a world firmly set with magic.