I liked 'Orphan Dani', the first book in Simon Driscoll's 'Dragon's Bane Chronicles' series, but it was an easy book to like and a hard book to love. 'Traveler Dani' is the second book in the series, but it feels very much like the first, with a book's worth of setup out of the way. That's because it feels as if this series is all about a journey and young Dani doesn't start out on that journey until this one. She's on the road to Tartom as it begins, ready to meet Mervad and set out on their shared quest to obtain the three crystals of Kaldonia that they'll need to become dragons.

I liked this one a little more than its predecessor, even with a misspelling in the very first line, and there are a few reasons for that.

One is that Dani grows as a character, which ought to have been inevitable but really didn't have to be. I didn't find her particularly sympathetic in the first book, because she's a bit of a brat. Sure, it has to be underlined that her life hasn't been particularly great. She's an orphan, for a start, who has gone through a number of foster families. At fourteen, she's suddenly taken in by an uncle (we think) who changes her life without giving her much choice in the matter. I'm not expecting her to be a fully-formed young lady comfortable with her lot in life, but that doesn't mean that I have to like her either. I didn't much. She's much more sympathetic here, as the miles pass. She grows into herself in what is probably the biggest success of the novel.

I won't talk too much about that, because it would be easy to leap into spoiler territory, especially when it comes to the obvious relationship that's going to build between Dani and Mervad. What I will say is that the first crystal is a thousand miles away when they begin and they're on foot, with that distance providing plenty of opportunity for growth. Also, while Mervad isn't too much older than Dani, he has spent far longer being educated far more deeply by his own dragon, Zanima, so he's far ahead of her in knowledge and a little ahead of her wisdom and can help her out.

Another is that the first book set up what seemed like a whole slew of cheats and, while there's a little of that here, Driscoll is keen to haul it all back in somewhat. All the outrageous convenience does come at a cost and that makes it far easier to accept.

For instance, Dani sets out on the road with a magic bag, in which her dragon friend and mentor Mazian has already stored an insane amount of stuff. It's tiny and almost weightless thus easy to carry and hardly a hindrance. It's obscenely bigger on the inside so you can carry infinite supplies without overhead. It's also magically preserving, so you can put in a cooked meal and take it out months later in exactly the same condition. What's more, it's automatically organised and trivial to access through will alone. It's an outrageous cheat. Well, not quite.

What Driscoll does here is to explain that such magic bags can't actually hold everything we might need. Sure, they're convenient but there are finite limits and our travellers soon realise that they have to both make-do and work together. They don't contain all the gold in the world, so they can't simply stop at an inn at every town. They don't contain all the food in the world, so they can't rely on prior preparation to keep sustained. They're going to have to sleep in a tent and find their own food and do all the other things that we might expect characters on a journey in a fantasy novel to do who don't have magic bags to fall back on. I liked this progression.

A third is the crystals. They're mentioned in the first book but without any reason whatsoever, as if it's just the way it was. You want to be a dragon, you collect three crystals and ta da! Again, that isn't the case. Driscoll has reasons why there are three and reasons why they're scattered. Those are all things we learn here and, while they're certainly born from time-honoured fantasy tropes, they do bear some originality.

So there's plenty of good here and more of it than there was in 'Orphan Dani'. We're on the road now, the journey underway. We seem to be in the company of the people who should be there and they're both growing as characters with each mile they walk. The lore of the series is growing and we're being given explanations that make sense. However, there's still mystery ahead. This is not the final book in the series and there's nuance enough that I'm less sure now how it's going to end up than I was before I began this book. And that's a good thing. I like the lack of inevitability.

All that said, I had a more mixed response to other aspects and a negative response to one. For instance, while I'm on board with this updated take on magic bags, I'm not quite as fond of the magic maps. Dani has a map that shows her the location of the crystals, which seems fair enough, but it's a magic map that functions rather like a highly focused version of Google Maps. Not only does it show her where the crystals are, even if they're moved, but it allows her to skip ahead and zoom in, so she can plan accordingly. I didn't like this much but I couldn't help but remember how the 'Star Wars' sequel trilogy had a map to a human being and I liked that a heck of a lot less.

I'm also in a mixed mind about the few lessons Dani experiences about unintended consequences. I liked them because they deepen her character, each of her adolescent assumptions honed into a more mature take on reality when this or that good deed goes awry. The world is a more complex place than a fourteen-year-old can imagine and Driscoll does a good job at illustrating that with a lesson here and a lesson there. However, I'd have appreciated that more in an adult fantasy than a YA one, because the choice of examples feels over-cynical and even a little nihilistic. Surely, there was opportunity to address these unintended consequences in ways beyond simply moving on.

What I liked the least was the romantic angle. It's not that it's there, because that makes sense - two characters on a long shared journey who share goals and desires. It's that it doesn't grow so much as it leaps forward. It's one minute this, another minute that, without much reason to get from the former to the latter. Maybe Driscoll will build nuance into that in the third entry in the series, 'Princess Dani'. Let's find out next month. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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