What do you think?
Rate this book
Etherno: Rise of the Dragongirl
Onin’s life is changed when he meets a mysterious new student with a fiery dual dragon nature. Then the secretive alien Matari recruit him and his friends to track down the body-snatching Natas. Between the aliens, the cute new girl, and his idiot roommate, can Onin manage to graduate college?Scholarship student Onin thought magical school would be easy.Sure, his roomie’s a little flakey and one of his classmates tends to sneeze herself into the wall, but that’s par for the course.Onin’s even made a connection with cute (and oddly warm) newcomer, Kasai.Then the alien Natas start possessing humans and targeting the magically-gifted. Now it will take all of Onin’s wits and his magical classmates’ help to stop the invasion and discover the true endgame of the Natas.Thankfully, they have a fiery half-dragon ally. One who seems curiously connected to quiet Kasai…
295 pages, ebook
First published January 31, 2019
6 people are currently reading
12 people want to read
About the author
Aaron DeMott
11 books39 followersAaron is the author of the Psygens and Space Cats series, and the Etherno series. Aaron is a certified Linux nerd who’s been a fan of both Star Trek and Star Wars as long as he can remember. Naturally he writes space-opera. He lives in rural Michigan with his wife, four kids, and at least two cats.
You can learn more about Aaron and his books at aarondemott.com
You can learn more about Aaron and his books at aarondemott.com
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 3, 2020
I'm going to remember reading "Etherno Rise of the Dragongirl" until the day I die, which hopefully will be soon. It is, without hyperbole, the worst book I have ever read. If I went into finest detail about all the ways the book doesn't work - from sections that are simply boring to those that wound me on a moral level - I would get a hand-written letter from Goodreads begging me to stop.
Calling the characters boring does a disservice to the color beige. Calling them stupid does a disservice to the soldiers who were supposed to check the Trojan horse. Calling them one-dimensional does a disservice to the author's penis. The main character (Onin) is nothing short of a pervert who takes every advantage to inspect his love interest's many physical features, which we hear about in cringe-worthy detail. He is unstoppably powerful, and his power (which is to generator "servitors") becomes stronger and stronger as the book goes on, and by the end, there's almost nothing they can't do. He's a "nice guy" Mary-Sue, and to argue with him, or dislike him in any way, might as well be a sin to the book. The love-interest (Kasai) has the personality of a bag of wet laundry, but at least she's beautiful! She's SO beautiful! It's the only part of her character that means anything! Somehow, someway, these two characters end up in a relationship that was so obvious it might as well have been a sparrow in your eye.
All the other characters have more or less a single data point: Tannin is a moron, Cerina is a bitch, and Saija used to be a bad guy. Cerina, at least, has the stones to say the other characters are stupid - which is why everyone thinks she's a bitch. SHE'S THE ONLY ONE WITH A BRAIN IN HER SKULL.
What's worse, despite the tiny, tiny drips of actual character development, none of it matters. The plot must go forward! Onin wants to do something? Sure! Somebody appears and gets into a fight? It was always meant to happen! "Railroading" is too kind a term. It doesn't matter where the characters go or what they do, the plot is right behind them, be it a beach vacation, a week-long team-building camp (they're there for three days), or a no-foolin', this is not a joke, this actually happened in the book NUDE HOT SPRINGS. The plot is there, and it's always, always, always dumb. Here's how it goes:
1): The book reveals something stupid. Let's say, for instance, the fact that aliens crash-landed on the planet a hundred years ago (or several hundred years ago, the book can't get it straight).
2): The book says something like "I wonder if we'll ever get to meet them?"
3): The characters meet the aliens. Or, in this specific case, the aliens send an email to Onin and Kasai and ask them out for dinner! AND THEN ONIN AND KASAI ACTUALLY GO TO DINNER WITH THE ALIENS WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE THEY ARE GOING!
Nothing is EVER surprising. There was no drama or suspense at all. The characters get into a fight? Let me guess, Onin pulls some power out of his butt and wins. Oh, look at that. But, it's not even easy to slip into the simple plot - stupider and stupider details abound, from the half-cat girl to the pill that fixes someone's DNA to the main characters, despite being literal idiot children, being sworn in as police cadets (how much does that change the plot? Not even a little bit!) so you're constantly in a spiral of horror, further and further down. It's so stupid, it comes around the other side to sane. The sky is plaid, birds burrow through the ground, and donuts rain from the sky. I have looked into the abyss, and the abyss got creeped out.
The writing. Do you know that idea that eventually a hundred monkeys at typewriters will produce the works of Shakespeare? Should have gone with that. There are hundreds of typos, grammatical errors, and punctuation mistakes. My favorite was the word "fourtenlty," which is actually spelled "Fortunately." What's worse, the best the actual writing can ever reach is "average." Most of it is unreadably boring. The descriptions, as rare as they are, are limited to visual details at the beginning of the scene, and then give way to awful, snarky dialogue. The worst of the three is the action, which I gave up trying to understand - it never mattered anyway, since it was clear the good guys were always going to win.
LOTS OF WOMEN ARE NAKED. I want you to make sure you see that point. The very first time we see the female lead, the book lovingly described her breasts. It's the very. First. Detail. Quote: "Well-endowed." More than once the main characters stumble upon entirely nude women, and once they then have to fight her. The original villain (who is Saija), is described thus: "And she wasn't wearing much. At all. A thin blue strip of cloth looped around her neck and down to barely cover her breasts, and her underwear made the mannequins in the lingerie store at the mall look fully covered in comparison."
The most description the book can give us is, every single time, about how a woman looks or what she is wearing. Bikinis. Tight tank tops. Often, far too often, nothing at all. The only exception to this rule is the huge paragraph of description about some of the characters filling cups of water. Oh, and lots of descriptions of powers interacting, but reading them feels like a beetle is burrowing into my brain.
This book is a Christian book. Now, I am not opposed to this. How, with all the gratuitous nudity, you might ask? Because they mention God (called "Ard" in the book), and the bad guys are - brace yourselves - "Satan" spelled backward! It's Christian only nominally: They mention Ard is the best thing ever, Kasai (who was raised by monks) proselytizes to all the characters, and all the characters say, basically, "Why yes, I now love Ard!" This is not the kind of Christian book anybody wants.
There is very, very little that this book manages to do at an even mediocre level. Most of it is painfully bad, sometimes to the point of real, actual tears. Here's how bad it is: More than once, as I was reading, I wondered if the author was writing it badly on purpose. But no - nobody could be so twisted.
I could go on. I could go on forever. Read this book to learn how not to write description. Or how not to write action scenes. Or dialogue. Or women. Or men. Read it if you want to play a game with your friends - the person who takes the longest to laugh out loud at how bad it is gets punished. The punishment is they have to read the rest of the book. Every plot point is bad. Every piece of dialogue made me sigh. I wanted to scream while reading it.
If I could give this negative stars, I would. Aaron Demott, you owe me a star.
Calling the characters boring does a disservice to the color beige. Calling them stupid does a disservice to the soldiers who were supposed to check the Trojan horse. Calling them one-dimensional does a disservice to the author's penis. The main character (Onin) is nothing short of a pervert who takes every advantage to inspect his love interest's many physical features, which we hear about in cringe-worthy detail. He is unstoppably powerful, and his power (which is to generator "servitors") becomes stronger and stronger as the book goes on, and by the end, there's almost nothing they can't do. He's a "nice guy" Mary-Sue, and to argue with him, or dislike him in any way, might as well be a sin to the book. The love-interest (Kasai) has the personality of a bag of wet laundry, but at least she's beautiful! She's SO beautiful! It's the only part of her character that means anything! Somehow, someway, these two characters end up in a relationship that was so obvious it might as well have been a sparrow in your eye.
All the other characters have more or less a single data point: Tannin is a moron, Cerina is a bitch, and Saija used to be a bad guy. Cerina, at least, has the stones to say the other characters are stupid - which is why everyone thinks she's a bitch. SHE'S THE ONLY ONE WITH A BRAIN IN HER SKULL.
What's worse, despite the tiny, tiny drips of actual character development, none of it matters. The plot must go forward! Onin wants to do something? Sure! Somebody appears and gets into a fight? It was always meant to happen! "Railroading" is too kind a term. It doesn't matter where the characters go or what they do, the plot is right behind them, be it a beach vacation, a week-long team-building camp (they're there for three days), or a no-foolin', this is not a joke, this actually happened in the book NUDE HOT SPRINGS. The plot is there, and it's always, always, always dumb. Here's how it goes:
1): The book reveals something stupid. Let's say, for instance, the fact that aliens crash-landed on the planet a hundred years ago (or several hundred years ago, the book can't get it straight).
2): The book says something like "I wonder if we'll ever get to meet them?"
3): The characters meet the aliens. Or, in this specific case, the aliens send an email to Onin and Kasai and ask them out for dinner! AND THEN ONIN AND KASAI ACTUALLY GO TO DINNER WITH THE ALIENS WITHOUT TELLING ANYONE THEY ARE GOING!
Nothing is EVER surprising. There was no drama or suspense at all. The characters get into a fight? Let me guess, Onin pulls some power out of his butt and wins. Oh, look at that. But, it's not even easy to slip into the simple plot - stupider and stupider details abound, from the half-cat girl to the pill that fixes someone's DNA to the main characters, despite being literal idiot children, being sworn in as police cadets (how much does that change the plot? Not even a little bit!) so you're constantly in a spiral of horror, further and further down. It's so stupid, it comes around the other side to sane. The sky is plaid, birds burrow through the ground, and donuts rain from the sky. I have looked into the abyss, and the abyss got creeped out.
The writing. Do you know that idea that eventually a hundred monkeys at typewriters will produce the works of Shakespeare? Should have gone with that. There are hundreds of typos, grammatical errors, and punctuation mistakes. My favorite was the word "fourtenlty," which is actually spelled "Fortunately." What's worse, the best the actual writing can ever reach is "average." Most of it is unreadably boring. The descriptions, as rare as they are, are limited to visual details at the beginning of the scene, and then give way to awful, snarky dialogue. The worst of the three is the action, which I gave up trying to understand - it never mattered anyway, since it was clear the good guys were always going to win.
LOTS OF WOMEN ARE NAKED. I want you to make sure you see that point. The very first time we see the female lead, the book lovingly described her breasts. It's the very. First. Detail. Quote: "Well-endowed." More than once the main characters stumble upon entirely nude women, and once they then have to fight her. The original villain (who is Saija), is described thus: "And she wasn't wearing much. At all. A thin blue strip of cloth looped around her neck and down to barely cover her breasts, and her underwear made the mannequins in the lingerie store at the mall look fully covered in comparison."
The most description the book can give us is, every single time, about how a woman looks or what she is wearing. Bikinis. Tight tank tops. Often, far too often, nothing at all. The only exception to this rule is the huge paragraph of description about some of the characters filling cups of water. Oh, and lots of descriptions of powers interacting, but reading them feels like a beetle is burrowing into my brain.
This book is a Christian book. Now, I am not opposed to this. How, with all the gratuitous nudity, you might ask? Because they mention God (called "Ard" in the book), and the bad guys are - brace yourselves - "Satan" spelled backward! It's Christian only nominally: They mention Ard is the best thing ever, Kasai (who was raised by monks) proselytizes to all the characters, and all the characters say, basically, "Why yes, I now love Ard!" This is not the kind of Christian book anybody wants.
There is very, very little that this book manages to do at an even mediocre level. Most of it is painfully bad, sometimes to the point of real, actual tears. Here's how bad it is: More than once, as I was reading, I wondered if the author was writing it badly on purpose. But no - nobody could be so twisted.
I could go on. I could go on forever. Read this book to learn how not to write description. Or how not to write action scenes. Or dialogue. Or women. Or men. Read it if you want to play a game with your friends - the person who takes the longest to laugh out loud at how bad it is gets punished. The punishment is they have to read the rest of the book. Every plot point is bad. Every piece of dialogue made me sigh. I wanted to scream while reading it.
If I could give this negative stars, I would. Aaron Demott, you owe me a star.
March 27, 2024
An absolutely phenomenal romance action fantasy that has great characters, epic action scenes, and all around just an insanely underrated book.
(Tannin is my favorite character)
(Tannin is my favorite character)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews