The Rage of Dragons

In this African-inspired, epic fantasy debut, Evan Winter crafts an engaging story of one young man’s insatiable desire for vengeance against the backdrop of a brutal war.

Chased from their ancestral homeland by supernatural enemies, the Omehi people have spent two hundred years carving out an existence on the peninsula of Xidda where they fight an unending war with the indigenous Hedeni. The Hedeni have the numbers; the Omehi have the ‘Gifted’, a select few citizens with magical abilities, including the power to control dragons. In addition to struggling against the Hedeni, the Omehi struggle among themselves with the nobility enforcing a rigid caste system upon common-born ‘Lessers’.

Teenaged Tau Solarin is one such Lesser, and, like most of his caste, he knows he will be little more than fodder for the war with the Hedeni. However, when three Nobles unjustly murder his father, Tau commits his life to revenge. He earns a place in the lower caste military and trains to become the greatest Omehi warrior ever in the hope that he can one day duel and defeat his father’s highborn killers. With Tau having neither natural strength nor magical ability, determination alone fuels Tau’s insatiable desire to improve. His reputation grows as his lower-caste unit outclasses Nobles in competition. As these successes turn the Omehi’s Nobles and Lessers against each other, a tentative peace with the Hedeni collapses. Faced with both a Noble coup and an all-out Hedeni invasion, Tau must struggle to defend his peace-supporting queen while still pursuing personal vengeance against the three Nobles who killed his father.

Winter crafts a well-paced epic fantasy; a thick book with short, action-packed chapters. The plot follows a classic arc: Tau is a small-town underdog whose sheer determination allows him to rise to greatness, first in training, and then as his Queendom battles lethal threats. Along the way, readers are fed a steady feast of sword fighting and gore, with nearly every page featuring the clash of bronze blades. Some readers may find this relentless pace exhausting; others exhilarating. Much of this nonstop action depicts Tau’s training, but Winter keeps these lower-stakes sections relevant by using them to develop the bonds between Tau and the other men of his unit who try to temper his single-minded lust for revenge.

Indeed, despite the wide scope of the world building, this is, first and foremost, Tau’s story. The linear, third person narration keeps a close focus on him although Winter occasionally uses scenes from other perspectives to show how Tau’s legend grows through the eyes of enemies and allies alike. Zuri, a Gifted enchantress and Tau’s love interest, has an important and tragic plot arc of her own, but some YA readers, used to alternating perspectives between hero and heroine, may be left craving more of her perspective.

Thematically, the novel asks the usual questions about revenge: How far will you go for justice? How much will it cost you and those you love? However, Winter adds resonance to these inner moral ambiguities by mirroring them with wider moral ambiguities in Omehi society, particularly in their use of dragons which the Omehi control through magical deception and blackmail. By the novel’s end, Tau has taken revenge on one of his father’s killers, allied with the second, and continues to hunt the third, setting the stage for the sequel. As the four-book series progresses, it will be interesting to see if Winter continues to use revenge to propel his protagonist, or if Tau’s motivations broaden further as he becomes embroiled in increasingly complex politics.

The Rage of Dragons provides an intense read with action aplenty and a compelling main character and should appeal to epic fantasy fans in their older teens or to adults as a crossover title.