The Dragon Twins by F.A. Ludwig is a story about two "princesses" across the world from one another meet and discover the sisterly bond they've both wanted for so long. Sara, the "American Princess" and President's daughter son learns the ways of her adopted sister Princess Kasumi and becomes a skilled samurai. Finding her place in the village life she takes on the responsibility of their princess all while dealing with a threat that has tried to kill her.

To me, editing aside, the story needs some work. It has potential to be a good novel and the story overall is fairly interesting, but somethings just didn't feel right. The characters themselves are interesting and have some depth to them, but I feel the speech is a little forced at times and switches between informal and formal with an uncomfortable frequency. The first thought I had about the writing style was along the lines of "fan-fic" status; it came off as a interesting story but written with a lack of details in speech, character development, etc. A lot of the story line did come off as "that would never happen" but as it is fiction it's always hard for me to decide when it's okay for that to take place. I did enjoy the scenery created for the village as well as them living an older lifestyle, it sounds truly beautiful not to mention relaxing. As I mentioned before, the speech was very hard to relate to and even embarrassing to read it at times. I have trouble classifying this into a genre really, it would seem young-adult from just looking at the summary and the title but as the story progressed it kind of grew out of that in some areas but remained young-adult in all the rest. I think if this was re-worked it could rise to it's full potential.

I won this book from the First-reads program on Goodreads. ( )

I find writing a review of this book difficult. The publisher's info page states that this book was printed unedited. With that in mind I cannot know how editing would reshape the text, if it would just fix grammer, spelling, and punctuation, or if it would go deeper and change the voices.

As it stands I found the book difficult to read for several reasons, the first being incredibly confusing punctuation, such as regularly incorrectly placed quotation marks, as well as other typographic errors. The story itself read like something that would be seen on TV. Character relationships developed at unrealistically, stranger to bosom friend in the word "hello". There was far too much conversational exposition, and little of it in the areas that would need spoke exposition to explain the situation to another character. There are no distinct character voices, rather tones for different moments of time, but any of the lines could be said interchangeably between anyone present who is on the same "side" (ie any protagonist or any antagonist). The treatment of sex was mind-bogglingly awkward, while attempting to portray a culture with a form of regimented free love belief.

I couldn't make myself finish this book. Unfortunately I think at the part where I could no longer summon interest was at the point where I think actual action may have been about to pick up. The errors, the inaccuracies, and the lack of character definition and substance got to be too much. ( )