Oct 23 2009
Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate by Adrienne Kress
Timothy and the Dragon’s Gate is an interesting take on a sequel. One that I confess I can’t recall reading before. It isn’t until nearly half-way into the book that the central character from Alex and the Ironic Gentleman enters the story.
Instead the first half, as you might expect, focuses on the titular Timothy. From the publisher’s blurb:
Timothy Freshwater’s father can’t control him, his mother is always out of town, and now the boy too smart for his own good has been expelled from the last school in the city. After he meets Mr. Shen, a mysterious Chinese mailroom clerk at his father’s office, Timothy winds up in more trouble than he has ever gotten himself into.
It turns out the diminutive Mr. Shen is a dragon. Forced to take human shape for a thousand years, Mr. Shen cannot resume his true form until he scales an ancient Dragon’s Gate during a festival for the 125th year of the dragon. Now Timothy finds himself Mr. Shen’s latest keeper: stalked by a ninja, and chased by a menacing trio of black taxicabs.
And therin lies the rub, as they say (do they really say that?). Allow me to cowardly pass of my own critism on to someone else by quoting Kirkus:
Sporting a chip on his shoulder the size of a sequoia while being prone to both snotty behavior and fits of rage, Timothy makes an annoying protagonist.
Yes, I too found Timothy to be an annoying protagonist but Kirkus said it better in one sentence.
One of the drawbacks of the chaos of my life lately, is that I haven’t been able to participate in as many conversations about books and reading as I would like. I read far too few book/literary blogs and only catch a small sliver of 
