The Dragon's Promise starts right where Six Crimson Cranes left off: Shiori and Seryu are entering the dragon realm of Ai'long. Of course, Shiori is not really welcome; Seryu's grandfather, the Dragon King and god of dragons, is upset that she took the starstroke to weave her net in the previous book. But she promised to bring him the broken dragon pearl, so she is granted an audience with him. OF course, Shiori being Shiori, she twisted her words: she didn't agree to GIVE it to him, so that makes the King wrathful once more.
And so begins The Dragon's Promise. Shiori goes from one encounter to the next, the literal incarnation of the saying "out of the frying pan and into the fire" as she keeps making pledges to people, and basically antagonizing the court of Ai'long for the first third of the book before magically somehow coming out of all the encounters in one piece.
And that's basically how the rest of the book went. Shiori seemed to have no self-preservation skills, no sense of decorum for a princess. She antagonized and lied to so many people, but somehow always came out okay. In Six Crimson Cranes, I enjoyed her character, and how she worked hard to make her way in the world without her privilege. But in The Dragon's Promise, when she once again has her privilege as a princess, she seems to not care about anything that comes with being a princess, and instead brute forces her way through everything. She somehow comes out okay in the end, but it gets really annoying along the way. I think after her adventures in Ai'Long, I stopped liking her character, which made it hard to actually finish the story. :( But I persevered through her lies to her father, and her adventure with her brothers and Takkan to the Forgotten Isles of Lapzur looking for the Wraith (and a way to finally defeat the demon-king Bandur).
I'll admit, I liked her solution to freeing the demons trapped in the mountain. After speaking with the Wraith (the half-demon, half-dragon who is the rightful owner of the dragon pearl), and talking to the shaman in Tambu about their nature (and how they are as much a part of the world as the dragons and the gods), she starts to look at them differently, thinking that maybe the Kiatan ancestors were wrong, and they shouldn't be trapped within the mountain any longer. But the Wraith also warned that, having been trapped for so long, they would take their revenge on the people. Her solution to free them but make sure everyone was safe was elegant.
So all in all, I wasn't a huge fan of The Dragon's Promise. I liked some of the ideas happening in the book, once I stopped liking the main character, it became a lot more painful to read. It also seemed to flit too quickly from thing to thing, and would have benefited being split into more books so the story could progress at a less break-neck speed and actually flesh out what was happening a lot more. I wish The Dragon's Promise had lived up to Six Crimson Cranes, but unfortunately I didn't think it did.
