The Last Dragonslayer

3 ½ out of 5 Covers

Jasper Fforde’s new series for young adults, The Chronicles of Kazam, features Jennifer Strange, a young 

woman who runs Kazam, an apartment complex for wizards in the kingdom of Hereford.  But there are problems in Kazam as magic is dying out, which means that means that none of the wizards can earn money to pay rent.

Things appear to look up when Jennifer is named, by prophecy, the last dragonslayer.  But this introduces Jennifer to a whole slew of new problems.  The dragon lives on a special reserve that only the dragonslayer can enter.  As the kingdom of Hereford is short on land, this means that the king anxiously awaits the new land that slaying the last dragon would make available, as well as the taxes he could charge.  But neighboring kingdoms are also interested in the land, leading to potential war.

These are a lot of heady problems to be dealt with and is evidence of Fforde’s talent at world building.  But the world building comes at the cost of characterization.  A lot of secondary characters are flat.  Beyond Jennifer, very few of the characters come alive.  There are also some problems with pacing, as it becomes quite frantic towards the climax. 

Jasper Fforde is a quite talent writer, but he hasn’t cracked the nut of young adult medium on this first effort.