The Search For The Red Dragon

This post first published June 6, 2011.

Author: James A. Owen
Published: January 2008
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing
Series: The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica
368 pages (hardcover)
 
The second book of this series is not really about the search for a The Red Dragon, a ship, as the title may suggest; it’s about the search for missing children.

Nine years have passed since the end of the events in book one. John, Jack and Charles have not seen each other since, but are called together once more because something terrible is happening in the Archipelago of Dreams, and requires the Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica to investigate. They discovered that not only are children missing from all over the Archipelago, but the great dragon ships are all missing, save for The Indigo Dragon. Their only is delivered to them by a little girl with artificial wings: “The Crusades have begun.”

I definitely liked this book and I think it’s better than book one. There is a lot of different stories crammed into this one: Peter Pan, the Pied Piper myths, Daedalus, the Greek Titans, Little Red Riding Hood, the Bermuda Triangle, Dante’s Inferno, and so on and so forth. The story is straight forward enough, but somehow, with all these various stories crossing over one another, I did become a tad confused at times, thinking, “Wait, how does that relate to this again?” Regardless, The Search For The Red Dragon ended up being quite epic in scale.

I guess my only complaint about the story is that it cuts quite close to being unoriginal. A large portion of the plot relied heavily on Peter Pan‘s influences, a reliance that was a little too dependent for my tastes. I realize that it is the nature of this series to borrow influences from other books and turn them into new stories. However, with the first book, I never once felt that the story was just a melting pot of other stories; it did feel like an original story, only with allusions to others. This second book felt a bit of the opposite.

I think the characterization in this book, and the writing, has definitely increased in quality this book. There’s definitely a bit more back story to some of the characters now, or expanded on, so that they feel more like real people with hopes, dreams and motivations. There are more female characters in this book than the previous, which is cool but I think the author can do better. There was only one before (Aven), but this time around, there’s also Laura Glue, the little girl with the artificial wings, and the only other new female character is a very minor villain trapped in a mirror. The writing in this book is much, much better too (not that it was particularly horrible before). While I could kind of tell that the author was not a writer first when reading Here There Be Dragons, the issue never crossed my mind once when reading The Search For The Red Dragon.

Overall, this is a great second book to the series. It not only expands on the first book, but makes it so much better. James A. Owen is showing that he definitely has what it takes to write books. I liked the story a lot, and the direction the series is heading in, although a part of me feels that there’s still a bit of oomph! missing, the missing factor that separates the good stories from the great stories. Anyway, I happily look forward to reading book three. My only question is how far the time gap will be between book two and three, given that book one and two had a time gap of nine years. The main trio of characters are middle aged already, I can’t imagine book three aging them another nine years …

My Rating: 3/5