Jennifer Scales and the Silver Elm

This is the third book in the "Jennifer Scales" series by MaryJanice Davidson. On the whole, it's not bad - it's an interesting story, well-written, and it's engaging. Plus, since it's written for a Young Adult audience, it's short. For all the shortness, however, it does resolve its crisis; there isn't anything left hanging as a "tune in next time", which made me happy.

*SPOILERS for the series. Possibly. Just FYI.*
Jennifer is back in form as a were-dragon. Her adventures take her to a lot of weird places, including a parallel time-line and a place known only to, and sacred to, the dragons.
They also take her into a realm of not only self-sufficiency, but (almost paradoxically) the realization that she isn't the only one affected by her decisions, she doesn't always know what's right, and maybe she should just shut up and pay attention once in a while to people that very likely do know more than she does, and very probably do have good, valid reasons for what they do. I'm not going to give away more than that; you'll have to read it.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. There were a couple things I wasn't thrilled with, though. The first was the opening scene. The "telling the end of the story first then doing a flashback to the rest of the story" schtick is getting old. Everyone is doing it these days, and I'm getting really tired of it. It was totally unnecessary, and I thought it was rather jarring. It didn't serve to get me interested in the story, it just annoyed me. Maybe it'll go over better with the YA readers.

Parts of the story seemed to be rather disconnected, jumping around from scene to scene with little to no real "segue" - or kludged in at the last second, almost like the authors said, "oh crud, we forgot that we had to resolve that...uh....cram it in there."

Other than those two things, though, I thought it was a good book. And really, the overall story arc and writing almost made up for those.
4 out of 5.
Other than that, though, I did enjoy it.