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Valentine Lovelace #1
The Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas
Determined to become an author of western penny dreadful novels like her idol, Ned Buntline, a young San Francisco newspaper editor christens herself Valentine Lovelace (after a floozie acquaintance of her father’s) and heads east for the Wild West.
She finds it in spades in the Texas Big Bend when she is kidnapped from a mule train by Comanches and ends up the guest of a ruthless comanchero, a sort of wild west warlord, after the Comanches are distracted by a. . .dragon?
Fort Draco, as the comanchero fort is known, is as full of intrigue and nighttime carryings-on as a modern day romantic novel, but Frank Drake, the owner, is no hero. If Valentine wants to save herself and the less-guilty if not entirely innocent folks who live there, she must defeat heat stroke, gunslingers, a couple of fake rainmakers and their camel, hostile Indians, the voice haunting her dreams (not in a good way) and a dragon who not only is gobbling all the livestock and transportation in the area but is guarding the only water hole in fifty miles of drought-ridden desert. And she must do it all while taking good notes, of course.
This is a western but not as we know it and a fantasy set where we’re not used to it.
She finds it in spades in the Texas Big Bend when she is kidnapped from a mule train by Comanches and ends up the guest of a ruthless comanchero, a sort of wild west warlord, after the Comanches are distracted by a. . .dragon?
Fort Draco, as the comanchero fort is known, is as full of intrigue and nighttime carryings-on as a modern day romantic novel, but Frank Drake, the owner, is no hero. If Valentine wants to save herself and the less-guilty if not entirely innocent folks who live there, she must defeat heat stroke, gunslingers, a couple of fake rainmakers and their camel, hostile Indians, the voice haunting her dreams (not in a good way) and a dragon who not only is gobbling all the livestock and transportation in the area but is guarding the only water hole in fifty miles of drought-ridden desert. And she must do it all while taking good notes, of course.
This is a western but not as we know it and a fantasy set where we’re not used to it.
247 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published June 1, 1986
6 people are currently reading
112 people want to read
About the author
Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
125 books210 followersElizabeth Ann Scarborough was born March 23, 1947, and lives in the Puget Sound area of Washington. Elizabeth won a Nebula Award in 1989 for her novel The Healer's War, and has written more than a dozen other novels. She has collaborated with Anne McCaffrey, best-known for creating the Dragonriders of Pern, to produce the Petaybee Series and the Acorna Series.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 16, 2011
Writing was good. Characters fleshed out relatively well. But it didn't have whatever element it Is that makes you care about the characters and their part in the story. It never grabbed me and held me. I just didn't care. This was one of those books I finished just so I could be sure I didn't miss anything. I didn't ~
May 20, 2019
A madcap, slightly crazy adventure, which mixed South American mythology, Spaghetti Westerns and an Edwardian style journal!
Young writer, Valentine Lovelace, runs away to experience the Wild West, where she hopes to get inspiration for her first novel. She somehow ends up kidnapped and taken to a camp of desperadoes, who regularly scalp the local Indians as well as trading them with weapons and supplies. But the camp is being terrorised by a dragon, one that has been called up by a ancestor of the ancient Mayan Jaguar Priestess'.
I found the premise intriguing and liked the mix of mythologies, but somehow none of the characters really appealed to me ... even the Dragon turned out to be rather more repellent once it started talking to its victims. I did enjoy the story, in that it is perfectly off-beat, quirky and definitely unique ... the whole idea of the bread cow was brilliant!
However, not one to read if a bit squeamish over animal's dying - there's a lot of that going on!!
Young writer, Valentine Lovelace, runs away to experience the Wild West, where she hopes to get inspiration for her first novel. She somehow ends up kidnapped and taken to a camp of desperadoes, who regularly scalp the local Indians as well as trading them with weapons and supplies. But the camp is being terrorised by a dragon, one that has been called up by a ancestor of the ancient Mayan Jaguar Priestess'.
I found the premise intriguing and liked the mix of mythologies, but somehow none of the characters really appealed to me ... even the Dragon turned out to be rather more repellent once it started talking to its victims. I did enjoy the story, in that it is perfectly off-beat, quirky and definitely unique ... the whole idea of the bread cow was brilliant!
However, not one to read if a bit squeamish over animal's dying - there's a lot of that going on!!
January 30, 2018
The plucky journalist heroine sets out to write penny dreadfuls and journeys to Texas to gather material. This also helps her to escape from her future stepmother who disapproves of her writing jobs. A funny story told with some very dry wit, the second novel is also a hoot!
A nice change from too much overly serious fiction.
A nice change from too much overly serious fiction.
October 28, 2020
Scarborough is a great writer. People don't give humor writers enough credit.
This is a funny western fantasy story. It's a nice light read.
This is a funny western fantasy story. It's a nice light read.
March 8, 2019
The kitschyness of the name and cover of this novel made me think that I had stumbled across “cosy fantasy.”
I just googled “cozy fantasy” and the first book on the Goodreads list of best “cozy fantasy” is Harry Potter, which is not what I was thinking of when I thought of “cozy fantasy.” I was thinking like cozy mysteries, where it’s set in a quaint, charming little world and for the most part things are fairly delightful or at least engagingly eccentric except there’s this one thing—in the case of The Drastic Dragon of Draco Texas, the dragon—that needs to be sorted out.
Instead, this book reads like the prim protagonist—who goes by the nom de plume Valentine Lovelace—is in civil court suing some unknown someone for an outrageous amount of money for ‘emotional damages’ and is in the process of retelling the ways in which she’s been wronged.
She’s the sort of narrator who might go “Oh, where was I? Right, so there I was, kidnapped, on horseback, and tied to the back of an unconscious Indian—I couldn’t steer let alone shift my weight or do anything to ease the repetition of the horse’s stride—hence these blisters which have been simply unmerciful!”If you were curious, the Indian was unconscious on account of too much whiskey that they had stolen from a mule-train.
I know that a book about the old wild west pretty much has to have Native Americans in it, but I admit I didn’t love the glib and caricaturist depictions of them. Even the mule-driver of Valentine’s cart—who is sleeping under the cart when the Indians attack and thus not yet seen—is better characterized and described.
Blech.
So the protagonist is kidnapped and carried off by Native Amedricans. They do, at one point, see a dragon. It’s brief and it’s dark and it’s quickly overshadowed by the kidnapping itself and followed up by the sale of Valentine to a comanchero.
(If, like me, your knowledge of the old west is extremely limited, a comanchero was a trader who primarily traded with Native Americans, and especially the Comanches—hence the name. Most notoriously, comancheros would buy and sell slaves, including folks the Native Americans captured during their raids.)
Up until this point, things that could have been exciting were happening, but that detached, retelling the event to a court-room sort of narration toned down any sort of thrill.
Then she falls in with the comanchero. We get introduced to countless people, we get to see the compound, we get flash-backs and info-dumps, we even get the history of people who are no longer at the comanchero compound. At best this sort of information wouldn’t be thrilling.
And the only hint of fantastical plot is that dragon and the fact that the protagonist sometimes dreams that she’s a dragon. There’s also a tertiary character who somehow seems to know something about the dragon. It’s not nothing, but it also doesn’t have much heft to it. At this point, I’m about 20% into the novel, and I need more.
I’d be lying if I weren’t a wee bit curious about what happens later on in the book, but I, unfortunately, have no reason to expect the writing to improve. I have heard really good things about Elizabeth Scarborough's other work. I'm going to assume this is an outlier and find my way back to her eventually.
[I read old fantasy and sci-fi novels written by women authors in search of forgotten gems. See the rest of this review at forfemfan.com]
I just googled “cozy fantasy” and the first book on the Goodreads list of best “cozy fantasy” is Harry Potter, which is not what I was thinking of when I thought of “cozy fantasy.” I was thinking like cozy mysteries, where it’s set in a quaint, charming little world and for the most part things are fairly delightful or at least engagingly eccentric except there’s this one thing—in the case of The Drastic Dragon of Draco Texas, the dragon—that needs to be sorted out.
Instead, this book reads like the prim protagonist—who goes by the nom de plume Valentine Lovelace—is in civil court suing some unknown someone for an outrageous amount of money for ‘emotional damages’ and is in the process of retelling the ways in which she’s been wronged.
She’s the sort of narrator who might go “Oh, where was I? Right, so there I was, kidnapped, on horseback, and tied to the back of an unconscious Indian—I couldn’t steer let alone shift my weight or do anything to ease the repetition of the horse’s stride—hence these blisters which have been simply unmerciful!”If you were curious, the Indian was unconscious on account of too much whiskey that they had stolen from a mule-train.
I know that a book about the old wild west pretty much has to have Native Americans in it, but I admit I didn’t love the glib and caricaturist depictions of them. Even the mule-driver of Valentine’s cart—who is sleeping under the cart when the Indians attack and thus not yet seen—is better characterized and described.
Blech.
So the protagonist is kidnapped and carried off by Native Amedricans. They do, at one point, see a dragon. It’s brief and it’s dark and it’s quickly overshadowed by the kidnapping itself and followed up by the sale of Valentine to a comanchero.
(If, like me, your knowledge of the old west is extremely limited, a comanchero was a trader who primarily traded with Native Americans, and especially the Comanches—hence the name. Most notoriously, comancheros would buy and sell slaves, including folks the Native Americans captured during their raids.)
Up until this point, things that could have been exciting were happening, but that detached, retelling the event to a court-room sort of narration toned down any sort of thrill.
Then she falls in with the comanchero. We get introduced to countless people, we get to see the compound, we get flash-backs and info-dumps, we even get the history of people who are no longer at the comanchero compound. At best this sort of information wouldn’t be thrilling.
And the only hint of fantastical plot is that dragon and the fact that the protagonist sometimes dreams that she’s a dragon. There’s also a tertiary character who somehow seems to know something about the dragon. It’s not nothing, but it also doesn’t have much heft to it. At this point, I’m about 20% into the novel, and I need more.
I’d be lying if I weren’t a wee bit curious about what happens later on in the book, but I, unfortunately, have no reason to expect the writing to improve. I have heard really good things about Elizabeth Scarborough's other work. I'm going to assume this is an outlier and find my way back to her eventually.
[I read old fantasy and sci-fi novels written by women authors in search of forgotten gems. See the rest of this review at forfemfan.com]
December 31, 2023
For a book that seemed like a fun, madcap, wild western fantasy romp, The Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas was a SLOG.
A dozen or more characters, none of whom were fleshed out enough to warrant their inclusion, and none of whom I was endeared to caring about at all. And that includes both the dragon and the protagonist.
This novel was like reading a recounting of one of my kids' dreams and as much as I appreciate the gift of it from a prolific-reader friend, I'm very glad that I'm done.
Not a fan.
A dozen or more characters, none of whom were fleshed out enough to warrant their inclusion, and none of whom I was endeared to caring about at all. And that includes both the dragon and the protagonist.
This novel was like reading a recounting of one of my kids' dreams and as much as I appreciate the gift of it from a prolific-reader friend, I'm very glad that I'm done.
Not a fan.
April 16, 2024
The historical fiction setting, the mixture of cultures, and plot were clever. However, the explanation of how the dragon came to live in the American west and its history were not very clear. I couldn't understand who Smoking Mirrors was, if there was more than one dragon, where the dragon originated outside of Earth, or why it had come, even though each of these aspects was briefly explained. In short, the idea is good, but the plot needs some cleaning up.
December 12, 2018
This was an off-beat fun read.
October 16, 2022
Rip-roaring fun.
Read
December 11, 2011I vacillated between being repelled and being intrigued by the campy looking cover art before I actually picked it up and read it. (By the way, those are red chili peppers in the girl's hand, not worms like I first thought! lol). And guess what? you really can't judge a book by its cover - this one is definitely better than it looks. I'm not saying it's great - it is a western fantasy, a genre I never knew existed, have never read and well honestly, does not generally appeal to me. However, it was an entertaining tale although since it is fantasy, you do have to suspend belief and just go with the story. And I thought it was very well-written - I really think that this writer was almost too good for the story - her writing style would seem to be more suitable to something a little more highbrow to me. I even thought the ending was not too bad - this is the part of most books that I think authors have the hardest time with and it's the part that I am usually the most unsatisfied with. So, I did not regret the time I spent reading this somewhat unusual (for me) book and I would try this author again (especially if she ever decided to go into non-fiction and write about her experiences as an army nurse in the Vietnam War). Thanks for sharing this book!
February 20, 2015
OK, so we have a character named "Drake" living in Fort Draco. With the book being about a dragon, I kept expecting to find a connection ... but there wasn't one. The author couldn't seem to decide if this was a fantasy tale, or a satire of the penny dreadfuls that the main character aspires to write. I don't think I will bother with the second in the series.
April 30, 2021
The Drastic Dragon of Draco, Texas by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough is the first of the Valentine Lovelace duology. It's the last one I'll be attempting. It's chock full of racist language and tropes and not much else.
http://pussreboots.com/blog/2021/comm...
http://pussreboots.com/blog/2021/comm...
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews