4.5 stars for Touched by Venom (Dragon Temple Saga book 1) by Janine Cross.
My first brush with book 1 of Dragon Temple Saga took place more than 1 year ago in a library during one of my hunts for books written in first person account. I was then deeply entranced by the prologue. Nonetheless, I did not borrow the book to finish what I have started at that time, simply because I was looking to read a book more skewed towards paranormal romance than fantasy. Regardless of the passage of time, the prologue still holds the same riveting pull it has on me, second time in reading. Thus, I have included the prologue I so love below, after the blurb.
Touched by Venom is not your run-of-the-mill fantasy to be read with a laid-back carefree mood. It is one that invokes a maelstrom of feelings that swirled within me as I read along. Love, fear, anxiety, dread, relief, anger, guilt, remorse, compassion, need, and hope all come into play, all in the name of upholding tradition and honorability in the story. The tale, a first person narration, is a look back in time by Zarg, on how a nine-year old her views and looks upon the world and how the world in return regards her, a female belonging to a gender that is wholly oppressed by the masculine. In the account, Zarg tells of her first encounter with the dragon's venom and the events leading to her subsequent addiction and obsession with it.
More often than not, we take for granted people around us and instead yearn for those out of reach. It is with much sympathy and empathy for Zarg as I read along, for she falls exactly to the former category. In her attempts to get back her first born, Zarg’s mother resorts to whatever ways she can think of, even at the expense of her younger daughter, Zarg who craves badly for her mother’s attention and affection. The mother so intent on her schemes that she treats her only daughter left as a tool rather than the girl she should love and cherish more. But obviously in time, Zarg learns that her mother does love her, but just in a different way, in an unusually eerie obsessive way that Zarg later asserts that to sleep is to be embalmed alive by her mother’s haunt.
The realm where Zarg lives in, is very much dominated by man, to the extent that there is even convention to naming of a holy woman. The author very skilfully informs readers that the women are deficient for two reasons, the first being that they are human and not dragon, the second simply because they are female. Despite the oppression she is submitted to, Zarg harbours a secret ambition, a fantasy dream which she thinks is an impossible goal. However, when the slightest opportunity presents itself one day, she wastes no time latching onto it and puts into motion the start of her plan for vengeance.
While the plot is richly detailed and set in a well imagined world of dragons and dragonlore, the same cannot be said of the grammar and sentence construction. However I am not one who is quick to judge and penalise for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and poor sentence construction as my focus is more on the essence of the story content. All the same, I still hope to see improvements in the later books.
All in all, Touched by Venom is a flavourful story, one which tastes very much of mysterious magic trapped in a brutal yet alluring world where dragons and their yearlings exist, created wholly by the author.
Publisher: Roc
Publication date: 1 Aug 2006
*** Favourite quote 1 ***
Tradition is not something to be followed without question, Zarq. It's rarely as pure and correct as it's made out to be. All tradition means is that something has become accepted over time. That's all. It's good to question such things.
*** Favourite quote 2 ***
According to convention, the name of a holy woman has to be comprised of two syllables, each formed by a three-stroke hieratic character. That number in our names—six—reminds us we are deficient on two counts, not worthy even in our written names to approach the sacred number 8. Firstly, we're deficient because we are human and not dragon. Secondly, we are female.
~ Touched by Venom
Janine Cross
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On a large dragon estate in Malacar, young Zarq Darquel's rebellious ways go unnoticed by the watchful eye of the Dragon Temple-until she accidentally captures the attention of an eccentric and dangerous dragonmaster and unleashes a storm of tragedy. Zarq and her delirious half-breed mother flee through the underworld of their land-from The Zone of the Dead to a sanctuary for outcast dragons, through discovery and persecution.
Consumed with the desire for revenge, Zarq develops a taste for the highly addictive venom drawn from the dragons she has been taught to revere, and sinks into a realm of bizarre magics. Here, influenced by the divine grace of dragon memories, Zarq glimpses possibilities of revenge and social revolution; but to achieve such, she must defy not just the sexual taboos and patriarchal conventions of her society, but the Emperor who rules her nation.
*Blurb from FantasticFiction*
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PROLOGUE
They came into the yard on a cloud of red dust, four young aristocrats burning with indignation and wine, and they went into the potters' work shed and hauled the woman out by her hair. They dragged her along the floor, through shards of shattered statues, out into the yard, where the smoke from the kilns was only just beginning to turn the air chalky. One man broke her jaw beneath his boot heel, then stood her against the wall of a mud-brick hut. Her knees sagged, so he dropped her. They began searching for her man.
They mistook Twisted Foot Ryn for the one they wanted, and it wasn't until Ryn's flock of children, all shrieks and small, balled fists, threw themselves upon the four that the aristocrats realized they'd erred. Weeping, Ryn's woman told them where to find the man they wanted.
He was in the men's ceramic studio. Blue powder covered the hairs on his brawny arms and filled the mortar on the table before him. He said nothing. Slowly, he placed his pestle down in the mortar. Just so.
They dragged him into the courtyard even though they needn't have, for he put up no resistance. With the leather laces from his own sandals, they bound his hands and ankles, then gagged him with a clot of clay and chaff, but one of the four said, No, take it out. She needs to hear him scream.
When they were ready, they led a yearling over, man height and twice as long, wings a-tremble and scales contracted, its claws fully intact: one of the warrior-lord's own dragons. They lashed the man upright against a water-filled barrel, then stacked an empty one atop it and ordered it filled with stones to prevent it from tipping. They cracked bullwhips against the yearling's hide and hurled platters at its head to drive it into a frenzy. It attacked the bound man.
Between drawing one breath and another, the man was disemboweled. But the aristocrats had difficulty bringing the yearling under control, and by the time they managed to subdue the beast with muzzle poles and blow darts, the ribbons of white sinew and meat strewn across the courtyard came not just from the once-bound man, but from a potter's child and one of the aristocrats.
Let this be a lesson to you, roared the blue-eyed, blond- haired aristocrat, as blood from a woman's mouth dried upon his boot heels. Let this be a lesson none of you forget!
I can assure you, blue-eyed, blond-haired one, no one forgot. Not the pottery clan men, who ever after were the most brutally devout upon Clutch Re. Not the women, who suffered blows for misdemeanors imagined and real. And certainly not the potters' children, who witnessed the horror of that day. They, most of all, lived lives haunted by the only two screams the bound man had time to utter, a man who'd been a master potter, a claimer, and a father.
My father.
The woman with the broken jaw, my mother.
No, I can assure you, blueeyed, blond-haired one, that was a lesson no one ever forgot. Least of all I, Zarq Kavarria Darquel. That lesson made me all that I am today.
I write this so the people of my new land—these gruff, impulsive foreigners—will understand and learn without ever witnessing such as I and the rest of the potters' children did, so many mountains, so many scars, and so many years ago.
*Prologue by Janine Cross*
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