My rating: 4 of 5 stars
To be up front- I read and listened to this book fairly quickly to finish it for a book club. So take this review with a grain of salt. I definitely got more out of it by reading it. In print (seriously, there is a difference!). Anyway, I enjoyed the beginning of the book, gathering the nuggets of the characters and who they are, watching the magic develop both literally and figuratively. I imagined the dragon to be Loki from Thor. Not sure if that is accurate, but it works for me, so don't ruin it. And I even liked the action, but it was a lot. The change in scenery was nice, meeting new characters was nice like the new magicians and all, and coming full circle back to the woods was nice. I like nice, so don't get me wrong, but the pacing was quite the roller coaster towards the end.
What I loved, though, was the ending. It wasn't a purely good vs. evil, but a great perspective of corruption. The book shows that there is a reason behind the madness (which may have evil consequences), and sometimes you need to flesh out the reason to fix the madness. And so overall, a 4/5 because while I was a bit lost at times (see the first sentence), I know if I reread this book, I'd get a whole new perspective because of the huge amount of content.