"The Erth Dragons: Dark Wyng" by Chris D'Lacey

This has been the absolute lamest book I've read in a long time that doesn't owe its lameness to objectionable content. Part of this was due to what I call the Renamed Concept Rule: the more things-with-real-words-for-them you rename, the less good your book tends to be. Just call it a horse, not a "whinney"; year, not "turn"; pine tree, not "spiker". (I seriously thought a "spiker" was some kind of hedgehog for pretty much the entire book.) If you want to have everybody ride around on giant carnivorous lizard-bird-things and call them vareks, that's fine, that's worldbuilding. This? Nope. (Note: If you're doing things like calling cars "horseless carriages" in a steampunk setting, that's usually fine, because it serves a purpose, and also that was an actual term for cars. These were seemingly renamed for no reason.)

As a counterpart, there's also the Intentional Misspelling Rule: the more terms in your book are just real words but spelled wrong, the less good your book tends to be. (I'm looking at you, "Erth" and "Wyng" and "Domayne".) Now, archaic spellings are mostly fine; if you want to say "magick," it might take some getting used to, but it's usually okay if your book is well-written (coughAdventurer'sGuidecough).

And don't even get me started on the random colons that would o:ccur in the midd:le of ran:dom words with no rh:yme or r:eason to any of the placem:ent. If you want to indicate an oddly-placed syllable break, just use an apostrophe, my man.

None of that actually tells you what this book is about, does it. TED:DW seems to be mostly finishing up a bunch of aftermath from a previous book, apparently (I looked it up) called The Erth Dragons: The Wearle. There's this weird guy who shows up and is totally an agent of some dead evil dragon thing. Most of the book centers around everyone being frustratingly blind to the fact that the weird guy is clearly up to no good, and then finally figuring it out only to discover that surprise surprise, he has MAGIC EVIL DRAGON P:OWERZ.

(The only people who actually manage to figure out Weirdguy is evil are the resident power-hungry annoying tribe leaders, and no characters of any account believe them because they're Untrustworthy™. Also, I'm not sure if they actually think he's evil or are just accusing him of it because he's a threat to them.)

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: E10+. As I said at the beginning, nothing really objectionable, it was just lame. There is some fantasy violence, though.

Despite its lameness, I'm giving TED:DW 2 stars. There aren't any parts I'd want to de-exist, but it's not something I particularly like either. (I am mildly annoyed by how "to not like" something means "to dislike" that thing in the English language, which deprives me of a concise way to express my indifferent feelings toward things. That doesn't apply here, as I do dislike this book somewhat, but it still kind of irks me.)

(Endnote: It seems there are like four books in this series. I'm not going to bother searching out the others.)