Brother To Dragons, Companion To Owls (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Ignoring all the other reviews below, I'll stare my own opinion haha. BtDCtO (the book) was really good, I really liked it. So much that I finished it within the day that I picked it up. So for a back story, SPOILERS, skip to the end of the paragraph if you've read it. Sarah, a thirty-something year old 'autistic' woman has been living in a psychiatric hospital for her entire life-even getting bounced from one to another. She barely owns anything except for a rubber dragon whose heads are named Between and Betwixt, who used to belong to her brother Dylan before they were separated. The Home (the hospital she's currently in) has to drop some patients that they see as capable of their own survival, and Sarah is chosen as one participant. Though she is more or less mute she can communicate through quotes from plays and movies she's seen. So she gets kicked out, and is on the street for one night before being taken by a member of the Wolf Pack, a group of delinquents/vagabonds that live under a group of rules they call 'the Law'. She lives here for a while, making friends with the Head Wolf and a car thief named Abalone and meeting an old professor. The rest of the plot gets a little weird in my opinion-- News comes that the Home wants her back and begins hunting her (especially this one doctor, Dr. Haas) and they flee away from the Wolf Pack to stay safe. During this time Abalone also reveals that Sarah had a brother, Dylan, and a sister, Eleanor, at one point. The three of them had been part of an experiment for 'Magical Thinking' which explains why Sarah can talk to her dragon, the walls, safes and keypads. The Head Wolf is captured though, as he had escaped the Home a while ago, and the pack has to go rescue him and some others of the pack still in their home. So after some action of listening to walls, getting shot and drawing a backward map, Sarah, Abalone and the Pack begin planning for the retrieval of the Head Wolf in which they use Abalones hacking skills to set up diversions and get him back. Then we break into another mental Institute (Ivy Institute) to check out if people are there (as this is where Sarah was held before the Home). Here Sarah is captured and taken to the new Institute where she can feel the presence of her dead brother and goes through the same experiments as him (attempting to let her have free speech). She makes friends with two people name Jersey and Margarita, who help her to escape after Dr. Haas (revealed as a very envious Eleanor) tries to kill her and her boss Dr. Aldrich flees to his headquarters. The Pack rescues her and takes Margarita as Jersey died, and leave. Not even a day later I believe, thy break into a high security compound and kill Dr.Aldrich and burn all his research, finding a baby in the process. And that's the end.* So I didn't think it was a bad book, it was definitely descriptive, the characters were alluring and had enough faucets to please me. Though the beginning of the book throws you into Sarah's life, but that seems to be the style of the book, to throw you in and you learn from that experience. Hey hey, like life! I liked Sarah's development and her freedom, I loved how much effort the author put in, making a character who can only speak in quotes-- that alone would've taken forever to find the right words to work in the story. I liked the character of Abalone and Professor Isabella, as they had a developing relationship. I liked the mystery around the Head Wolf and the rest if the Pack, and I loved Betwixt and Between! The characters were all decently fleshed out, but what I didn't like was the action. Within the course of one week they raid three institutions with the help of the Pack, who have reached the consensus "Help this girl no matter what". The lack of mental fatigue or crippling emotions (except for the occasional fainting) seems out of place to me, and the kindness that Sarah shows is severely juxtaposed by the cruelty in the way she kills Eleanor in a following scene. So as much as I liked the characters and the way they communicated with their world, I had to give it four stars for the bunch up of action. It easily could've constituted another book or more suspense could've been added to make an even better book.
In her asylum, Sarah is different than the rest. She only speaks in memorized verse--especially Shakespeare and Blake--and always has her vinyl two-headed dragon close by. However, she's not really autistic. When budget cuts force her onto the streets, she falls into a street gang that guards her with fierce protectiveness. Sarah soon realizes something strange: she can hear the voices of more objects than her dragons. Walls speak their security codes, and paintings tell their history. And when a doctor from the asylum that raised her begins a frantic search for Sarah, she'll need all the wiles of her street friends and her own gifts if she'll make it out alive.[return][return]I love the premise here. Sarah is an amazing character, and first person narration works perfectly here because she can think like other people, but she doesn't speak or listen like others. The beginning of the book is filled with vibrant characters from the street; on some levels those interactions worked, though some sexual elements felt forced and didn't fit with the rest of the book. Her friend Abalone shines. In the latter half, that feeling isn't there. Sarah is on the run and the cast is limited, and some of the best characters from the beginning fall into stereotypes. It makes the book feel unbalanced. One of the big plot twists at the end was easy to see coming, too. It's not a bad read--it's good for a study of technique alone--but I don't feel it's worth keeping.
What do You think about Brother To Dragons, Companion To Owls (2006)?
A strange novel about a girl who can only speak in quotes and talk to inanimate objects. She is released from a mental institution, joins a gang, and then hides away from people searching for her. I thought this novel was very strange. A few things happened that I thought were horrible and made me sad for humanity, especially because I could believe it happening in real life. They were not really major portions of the book, but it tinted the way I viewed the entire story. This novel was completely different in style from Lindskold's Fire Keeper saga. I did not think that I would like it, but I was interested/intrigued enough to not put it down.
—MarsianMan
My familiarity with Lindskold thus far has been limited to the Firekeeper books- also dealing with wolves and packs but in a very different manner. It is interesting to see how she crafted this story- that is so different in time and place than the ones I have read. After reading the first book, Through Wolf's Eyes, I went to her website to learn more about her. Fascinating.I liked this book- it provided the respite I needed from the onslaught of nonfiction I have been reading. I had trouble picturing the jungle in my mind, or the world that existed outside of it, but I think that's more my frame of mind of late than a failure of the author. And I, personally, have no difficulty believing that inanimate objects have personalities. I have known quite a few! : )
—bookczuk
To me, Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls is one of those rare books that is both a great read and yet lacks earning itself a high rating. Before going forward on this review, I have to emphasize that I enjoyed reading this story.The best writing involves mixing the familiar with the unfamiliar. You want to show the reader that you have enough knowledge of the familiar so that you can gloss over the unfamiliar without the reader feeling like they are missing something. In this book, Jane Lindskold starts with a mental health institute in a dystopia for her familiar. Unfortunately, reading Jane's portrayal of how a schizophrenic behaves when over medicated or how quickly the moods of a manic-depressive change threw me off just enough that it took me out of that sense of real. I very much wanted to get back into the book and to believe the story but that moment never came. Most readers are unlikely to notice this problem.Being thrown off course from the start of the book is unfortunate, because Jane does something that I have yet to see from other authors. The protagonist of the story, Sarah, finds herself in a world she is unfamiliar with. One of the friends she comes to have, Abalone is a computer hacker. Unlike the many other stories I have read with a computer hacker, this one is done right. Sarah doesn't understand what Abalone is doing even after Abalone tries to teach her. Abalone spends weeks working on projects and, through the eyes of Sarah, we see that these projects are often quite frustrating. Because we see the frustration and time she puts in on complicated, later, we can believe Abalone when she is able to quickly throw something simple together, such as setting of sprinklers or shutting off alarms.The overall plot of this book was well developed. Though certain elements were predictable, for the most part, I went forward wondering what was going to be happening next. However, pieces sometimes stood out as forced. In one particular point near the end of the book, Dr. Isabella provides an answer to a question that I felt would have best left unanswered. The only other issue I had with the book was the relationship between Sarah and Head Wolf. At the beginning, it seems forced. I had trouble seeing Sarah as being sexual. Her limitations and her possession of Between and Betwixt gave me an image of her being childlike though clearly, the two-headed dragon was not a delusion. However, further annoying me is that the relationship disappeared after the second act. By not coming back to it when I was able to see Sarah as stronger and more mature, left me feeling cheated. I needed something more of this relationship or I needed it removed.
—Joshua Keezer
