Not much to say as the books turned out not to quite match up to the promise of the idea although I liked the characterisation. So haven't kept them and don't remember much detail. ( )

This is the third volume of Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy, in which five children find themselves in a fantasy realm they thought they'd invented as part of a game. Honestly, I pretty much only read this one out of some completist impulse, as the first two books didn't exactly thrill me. Which is frustrating, because it seems to me that there's a good story buried in here somewhere, something with, at least potentially, an interesting plot and a bit of drama and a nifty little metafictional thread running through it. Pity it's ruined in the execution.

The main problem is the dialog. (Well, mostly the dialog; it bleeds over into other parts of the prose, too.) The problem with the dialog being that Dean needs to learn write her own damn dialog. I swear, there are entire conversations here where the characters talk entirely in Shakespeare quotes. For no good reason. When they're not quoting Shakespeare, it's poetry, or folk songs, or any of a number of writers that seem to be tossed into the mix just because the author likes them, and never mind how ridiculous it is that the child characters are somehow as expert in this stuff as your average English literature professor. There is, perhaps, some narrative justification for including the occasional quotation or snatch of poetry, and, if done with a light touch, it might have been pleasant and clever. As it is? No. No, it is not clever. It is pretentious, distracting, obfuscatory, and really goddamned annoying.

This volume, at least, was a faster read for me than the previous two, despite being the longest of the three. But it's also the point where the last thread of my forgiveness for Dean's writing snapped.

Rating: 2/5, and I'm going to let that rating stand for the series as a whole. Yes, I know I rated the first two books higher than that. It was wishful thinking; while there are good aspects to this series, they just do not overcome the annoyance factor, no matter how much I kept wanting them to. ( )

I thought this was the best book of the trilogy, although it still frustrated me in many ways. The best way I can put is it that through the trilogy, Dean made the characters more substantial, but the Secret Country still seems threadbare. That's appropriate for a world that may have been created in a children's let's-pretend game, but by this point, we're supposed to be thinking that the Secret Country is real—and there's just not enough there to feel real. But yes, I did like that we get to know the characters better (most of them, anyway; Patrick falls by the wayside in this book). Where we once only saw the story through Ted and Laura's points-of-view, we now also see the story through Ellen and Ruth's eyes. The story's end leaves some questions unanswered and is a bit pat, but it does feel like a conclusion. Plus, there's a twist to the end that I haven't seen in other travel-to-a-magical-land books, and I appreciate originality! ( )

Ruth, Patrick, Ted, Ellen, and Laura go home, but it is not long after that Ted and Laura stumble on a series of events that bring them back to the Secret Country. When they return, things aren’t what they used to be, now that Fence and Randolph know about the cousins’ secret. Meanwhile, there are still things in the Secret Country that must be fixed: Fence must lead a group to the Heathwill Library to find answers, and Randolph must lead another to the Lords of the Dead and then the Dragon King.

I don’t have much to say about The Whim of the Dragon that doesn’t apply for my reviews of the two earlier books in this trilogy. Pamela Dean writes an intelligent, twisty young adult series with rich characterization and an ambiguity that is tantalizing as much as it can sometimes be frustrating. I do think it veers a little more towards frustrating in this book because it is the last in the series and the reader wants conclusion. It doesn’t make The Whim of the Dragon bad but it did leave me with a lot of (spoiler-filled) questions.

What were Melanie’s motives? Why did she give herself to the Lords of the Dead? Why did the children hear the voices of the royal children? Why did the Dragon King attack the Hidden Land? Since when does Randolph have feelings for Ruth? Was Andrew a spy?

In the author bio for my copy of the book, Pamela Dean says originally she had written a long story that she was later forced to trim. I think either she trimmed too much or she purposefully left questions dangling.

Even so, there’s a lot this book offers. I do like the ending and the divisions that are made between the children who stay and the children who go. It made a lot of sense to me and left a ball of tenderness lodged in my throat. ( )

This book has, as a friend warned me while I was reading it, a very Pamela Dean ending -- it sort of sneaks up on you, and isn't as satisfying as you might have wanted. On the other hand, it (and the two others in the trilogy) also has a full collection of Pamela Dean characters, whom after spending three books with I feel like I know better than some people I actually know, and is chock full of Pamela Dean turns of phrase, so I can deal with the ending. ( )