The Rose and the Dragon

The Rose and the Dragon
Toni V. Sweeney
Publish America
ISBN: 1-4137-3597-5
Fiction, Romance, Fantasy
Reviewed by Eugen M. Bacon

As far as romance goes, The Rose and the Dragon is fresh as baby’s breath, wide as an exotic oak. Matter of fact, it perfectly fits a Mills & Boon identikit and tosses in a few astonishments of its own.
As in what must be its sequel, Dragon in Chains, no real dragons bellow, no red flames leap to scorch true love. But there is a House of Andrus, and two Apollos who are not Greek but Gataen, males who bear the names of Dominic and Kit. And though Miranda is only human, not Terran or Hahn, and does not foresee how deeply her life is about to change, she picks the gauntlet when she answers an ad to nanny little savages that are not so little. She is tossed in a foreign land with such beauty conceivably best limited to optical illusions, and finds herself increasingly drawn to the fine-looking brothers with jungle-green eyes, and their ritualistic, embattled world.
Cell phones, pen lights, laser proofs, blood vials, war heads, orbital gun ships, hover ships, assassins, green men in suits: ample adventure is here. But it becomes increasingly difficult to get a handle on the technology level of this planet, for now simpler concepts as plain rifles and boats; now a burst of space ships, cold lasers, solariums and holograms. The blend can boggle the intelli mind and much shed conviction.
Cotton wisps of cloud, squad moons sometimes foursome, white, shimmering stars: as always, Toni’s writing is toned, ideas nicely fleshed. But some ghosts are best left to lie. Once something exquisite and on an exemplary plane has been sampled, it is hard, so very hard, to revert to something lesser. Much as I love Toni’s writing, and though talent steals through here, I did not quite connect with this tale, and it did not absorb me as much as later works. Perhaps simply a case of genre mismatch. A finer and more affluent, highly recommendable taster of Toni’s talent would be Murder in Old Blood or her Amazon Shorts.