Title: Midshipwizard Halcyon Blithe
Author: James M. Ward
Year: 2005
Publisher: Tor Books
Reviewer: Naomi Hinchen

The jacket flap describes this book as Hornblower meets Harry Potter.
I suppose that's sort of true, insofar as there are naval battles and
a young wizard learns to use his magic.  Personally, I was hoping for
something like the Temeraire series, but suffice it to say, James Ward
is no Naomi Novik.

Which is a pity, because the trappings of Ward's world are pretty
cool.  There are ships on the backs of giant telepathic dragons!  The
enemy country has evil shapeshifters!  Unfortunately, the rest of the
book doesn't live up to the nifty scenery.  A brief enumeration of the
author's writing sins:

* The somewhat stilted tone of the writing.  This was the one that got
  under my skin from the very beginning.  I can read and enjoy books
  that, in hindsight, aren't all that great, but not when the author's
  style bogs me down on every page.

* Telling and not showing.  Oh, so much telling and not showing.

* Mary Suism.  The main character has awesome and really rare magical
  powers, can talk to dragons, has demon blood in him, gets loads of
  unique magic items, is good at everything, is popular with all the
  likable characters, has a famously heroic dead father, etc.  This is
  only slightly mitigated by his using his rare magical powers to do
  something stupid that gets everyone in trouble.

* In a moment of crisis, the main character suddenly remembers that
  all this time he's had a magic pixie wish he can use to save
  everyone.  Yes, a magic pixie wish.  No, this had never been
  mentioned before.  I wish I were making this up.

* Not introducing actual plot until halfway through the book.  The
  first half is mostly long scenes of infodump, as Halcyon learns
  about magic, his naval duties, dragonships, etc.  Even the
  foreshadowing takes its sweet time showing up.

* When a book is about a midshipwizard being trained, the author
  should know how the training system works.  Other midshipwizards who
  have been on the ship longer should not be learning everything for
  the first time to make the protagonist look good.  Anyone trained at
  the midshipwizard academy (especially anyone from a large family of
  famous naval wizards) should not be allowed to graduate ignorant of
  both the fundamentals of serving aboard a ship and how to avoid
  causing life-threatening magical disasters.  Either ship duty is
  part of the learning experience, in which case they shouldn't be
  sailing into a war zone, or these kids who are still picking up the
  basics are considered fully-trained officers, which raises the
  question of how they haven't yet lost the war.

Honestly, the best I can say about this book is that the setting could
give rise to some interesting fanfic.  I didn't much care about the
characters, the plot didn't show up for ages, and even cool
dragonships can only go so far to make a book entertaining.  I suppose
it's possible that the sequel is better plotted, now that a lot of the
infodump is out of the way, but given my dislike of Ward's writing
style, I'm not terribly inclined to find out.  In other hands, this
could have been a fun book---I'd love to see what Brian Jacques, with
his well-known love of nautical tales, would have made of it.  As it
is, it was a disappointment.