Raising Dragons by Bryan Davis

Billy and his family are rather normal, but when a crazy man starts to hunt them. Billy learns he had been lied to his whole life. His dad really is a dragon, forced to change into human form to avoid getting killed by slayers that will forever hunt him and his offspring. While Billy and his family are running from a maniac guy with a sword, Billy is trying to learn how to trust his family again and learn the truth.
Bonnie is a loner; living in the foster care system sure doesn’t help. She can’t trust anyone, because telling the wrong person the truth might get her killed. Living like life is normal is hard, but with her strange condition it is next to impossible to make friends and live a common life.

Together they will fight for their lives and discover that they have to rely on each other to survive.

I thought the characters were descent, maybe to cut and paste for my taste. Bonnie is a orphan who is looking for a place to fit in. Billy a middle of the road guy between cool and dorky that likes to draw and hang with his best friend, Walter. I would have liked a bit more diversity and distinction between them. The fact that all the characters fit into stereo-type cut outs society uses to describe people was boring, since people are not cut and paste in real life. 
As for the villain I think that he was flat. He was described as insane, that fits him to a tea. We never understand why he has such a hatred for the dragons, just that he does. I have read many books and feel this villain was one of the weakest I have ever read.

The plot was alright, it had a good opening chapter and kept the pace up for the rest of the book. There were a couple lags but since the book is 371 pages long it was paced well enough to keep me interested. The book is based off of King Arthur mythology, just with a twist. dragons are real, and living in the modern world. I liked this idea, and feel that in the long run Davis pulled it off very well.

One of my biggest down falls is with Billy and Bonnie’s romance thing. I say “thing” because their ages aren’t given in the book but from the way they act they aren’t old enough to be dating or seriously thinking of marriage. For some reason they both fall in love with each other in the book during battles and running from the bad guys. I feel with the stress they were going through, falling into each others arms isn’t a good way to have their friendship go. It was very unrealistic, and came off corny. 

Raising Dragons is a good book for fantasy lovers and younger readers, not bad but not great.

C+

Thank you to Living Ink books for providing me with this review copy.