The Flight of the Darkstar Dragon: A Darkstar Novel by Benedict Patrick

A new Wonderland where magic meets mayhem.

A steampunk flavored quasi-military version of Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole. A new and amazing world to explore is found in these pages. Just when you think you have read about everything, a book like this comes along and opens your eyes to a new dimension that makes no sense to ordinary people. Exhilarating and terrifying all at once.

Author of the beautiful and haunting Yarnsworld books, Benedict Patrick has already shown us that he can spin a great story with fantastic wild fantasy elements, brimming with folklore, that will take you back to memories of the grimmest fairy tales.

Here, the author brings us another world, the Darkstar, and it’s marvelous.  With another masterpiece cover from Seedlings Design Studio, Jenny Zemantek created an iconic image that will have readers doing a double take. This particular cover is another first. Rather than using existing elements, this is Jenny’s first fully illustrated design.

The Flight of the Darkstar Dragon takes your perceptions and turns them inside out right along  with those of its characters. The protagonist here is a young first officer, Choi Minjun, from the academy in Windward. A world of only islands and seas. Min, as she is known to her friends, has spent a decade training to sail the waters of her home world and to protect and serve the gentle island of Windward and its utopian attitude of equality, tolerance, and knowledge. She is young for an officer and is thrust into her first command as a research vessel for the scholarly son of the Admiral of the Windward Naval Fleet. But she isn’t the captain of her ship. She is simply the highest ranking office aboard, and a goodly portion of the crew take pains to remind her of that fact on a daily basis. Her youth, and the derision of the rude, entitled, scholar she has aboard, are something she struggles to comes to terms with, as she attempts to win over the older crew. Tensions were high enough before they found themselves stranded in another world altogether.

Excerpt:

Jedda’s mouth opened in a large ‘O’. She glanced down at the fish shining below them, then looked back upward. High above them, well beyond the purple orb that lit the featureless sea, countless luminous fish swam their way along the water that somehow, impossibly, formed the sky.

The Darkstar dimension bends reality as everything that’s impossible is possible there. It is also a very dangerous place, especially for Min and the crew of the skyship, the  Melodious Narwhal, as the crew begins to turn on one another in their desperation. There is plenty of action from page one and theres little respite throughout.  A truly enjoyable exploration of character, honor, empathy, and trust combined with human perseverance, all stirred with a huge dose of magic. The chapters are cleverly narrated with interspersed journal entries that do not tell us the author, but let you figure that one out in fairly short order on your own. These were some of my favorite moments throughout the book. I started looking forward to each one as they were the crux of the real world building. Oh, and a dragon so big it sleeps wrapped around a star, is possessed with an unpredictable appetite, and a fond taste for turtlemoths, a sentient species to which I am now quite attached.  A fact which quickly becomes quite dire to the lives of everyone involved. Hors d’oeuvres anyone?

Benedict Patrick’s imagination is impressively wild and his books will always entertain the reader with places and people that are far beyond mundane. This new setting leaves open as many possibilities as there are stars in the night sky. A truly fun read. Between flying rays, and light beings riding on a herd of whales swimming in the sky, I can’t wait to see where it takes us next.

5/5 stars

About the book:

Impossible world. Impossible dragon. Impossible adventure.
Lost with her ship and crew in an unfamiliar land, Min’s first command could be her last.
Nothing here behaves the way it should:
The magic that powers her skyship has been drained, rendering it immobile.
The sky is an endless twilight, lit by the luminous fish that swim in it.
Off starboard, there’s also the country-sized dragon that is looking particularly hungry.

It will take all of Min’s training and experience to get her people safely back home, but as the truth about the Darkstar Dimension begins to be revealed, Min will have to prove to her crew – and to herself – that she is still the best person for the job.

From the twisted mind that created the ‘delightfully weird’ Yarnsworld series comes a fantasy adventure like no other.

The Flight of the Darkstar Dragon is set for release October 7, 2019.

About the author:

Benedict Patrick is from a small town in Northern Ireland called Banbridge, but has been living and working in Scotland since he moved there at the age of eighteen. Tragically, that was quite a while ago.

He has been writing for most of his life, and has been reading for pretty much all of it (with help from mum and dad at the beginning). Benedict’s life changed when a substitute primary school teacher read his class part of The Hobbit and later loaned him the book – he fell in love with the fantasy genre and never looked back.

Ben can be found lurking about the following places where you can follow or sign up for free stories.

http://www.benedictpatrick.com

Twitter: @benedictpaddy

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Benedictpatrickbooks/

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