The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True – 4 Star Book Review

Welcome to one of the January 23rd stops on the blog tour for The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson, organized by Storyteller on Tour. Be sure to follow the rest of the tour for promos, other reviews, guest posts and interviews with the author, and a giveaway! (More info on that at the end of this post.)

Please note that this post contains affiliate links, which means there is no additional cost to you if you shop using my links, but I will earn a small percentage in commission. A program-specific disclaimer is at the bottom of this post.

About the Book

The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True
Heloise the Bard Book One
by Sean Gibson

Published 15 December 2020
by The Parliament House

Genre: Comic Fantasy
Page Count: 308
Add it to your Goodreads TBR!

Sure, you think you know the story of the fearsome red dragon, Dragonia. How it terrorized the village of Skendrick until a brave band of heroes answered the noble villagers’ call for aid. How nothing could stop those courageous souls from facing down the dragon. How they emerged victorious and laden with treas-ure.

But, even in a world filled with epic adventures and tales of derring-do, where dragons, goblins, and unli-censed prestidigitators run amok, legendary heroes don’t always know what they’re doing. Sometimes they’re clueless. Sometimes beleaguered townsfolk are more hapless than helpless. And orcs? They’re not always assholes, and sometimes they don’t actually want to eat your children.

Heloise the Bard, Erithea’s most renowned storyteller (at least, to hear her tell it), is here to set the record straight. See, it turns out adventuring isn’t easy, and true heroism is as rare as an articulate villager.

Having spent decades propagating this particular myth (which, incidentally, she wrote), she’s finally able to tell the real story—for which she just so happened to have a front-row seat.

Welcome to Erithea. I hope you brought a change of undergarments—things are going to get messy.

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My Review

My Rating: 4 Stars
Consider “liking” my review on Goodreads.

I was granted complimentary access to The Part about the Dragon Was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson to review for a blog tour for this title organized by Storytellers on Tour. Thank you to all involved in granting me this opportunity! This has not swayed my opinion; my thoughts are my own and my review is honest.

Fans of Pratchett need to check out this book and, presumably, everything else by this author! This absurdist comedy about a bard in a fantasy world who’s ready to tell the REAL story behind her most successful myth is such a fun ride. This will appeal to fans of Pratchett, fans of quest fantasies, and likely also fans of LitRPG and classic fantasy RPG players, particularly if you have a sense of humour.

I love Heloise, she’s great! Those who follow my reviews may not know that I’m an aspiring SFF author myself, and I have many in-progress and abandoned fantasies taking up notebooks and flash drives all over the place. I once started a story about a young bard, initially inspired by wondering what Chronicler from Rothfuss’ world might have been like as a teenager, but the character I ended up with was quite similar to Heloise. Younger, male, and a lot less self-confident (in his case it’ll come with age and experience) but I feel like they’d be fast friends if they ever met. Reading Heloise was like having a long conversation with my old forgotten character who had gone off, lived a whole life, and come back to tell me about it.

This is truly a hilarious adventure, and if anyone disagrees, there are rock giants to answer to. And dragons. (Allegedly.) With that said, I must agree with several other reviewers before me (I like to make sure we’ve all read the same book when I’m done reading) that it perhaps hits a little too hard, too soon with the humour. We’ve been assured that this book can be read as a stand-alone without having read any of Heloise’s other adventures, and as someone who has not yet had that pleasure I can attest that seems to be true, but for the first 10-20% I did truly feel like as I was trying to get to know Heloise and the gang I was being hit over the head with the “I AM FUNNY!!!” stick and it could do with a little padding. Maybe a layer of nerf foam. Make it a LARP-approved stick. (Okay, I’ll show myself out.)

I absolutely must go track down Sean Gibson’s other works now and I add them to my TBR. You should do the same!

About the Author

Sean Gibson is not a professional mini biography writer (if he were, this would be much more compelling). Instead, he’s a marketing professional by day, hangs out with his amazing wife, son, and daughter by night, and writes somewhere in between. He holds a BA in English Literature from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, but he really wishes he had been able to matriculate at Hogwarts (he would have been in Hufflepuff for sure). Sean is a fan of sports teams from Detroit, a distressingly large number of bands that rose to prominence in the 1980s, and writing in the third person. He currently resides in Northern Virginia, and, given how much he hates moving, and given that his house has an awesome library, is likely to remain there for some time.

In addition to The Part About the Dragon Was (Mostly) True, Sean is the author of The Chronicle of Heloise & Grimple as well as The Camelot Shadow and its prequel short, “The Strange Task Before Me.” He has written extensively for Kirkus Reviews, and his book reviews have also appeared in Esquire.

Follow him on Twitter @Gibknight, but only if you’re really bored and enjoy tomfoolery.

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Giveaway Alert!

Enter to win one of three paperback copies of The Part About the Dragon was (Mostly) True by Sean Gibson! (Sorry, USA only.)

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