Books like Dragonhaven

Dragonhaven is the book that singlehandedly demoted Robin McKinley from an auto-buy author to a "check out her book in the library first" author for me. I've had issues with a lot of her other recent novels--some of them are quite odd, and she's developed a fondness for incomprehensible, nightmarish magical scenes--but this book was the last straw that broke my devotion. Maybe if I were 14 I'd enjoy reading a whole novel written in a 15-year-old guy's voice. Maybe. As it is, I found the writing style truly painful to read. That was my first and biggest problem with Dragonhaven, but there were other problems. I'm not sure how McKinley--one of my favorite authors--made a story about finding intelligent dragons and raising a baby dragon so rambling and boring and near-pointless, but damn. I kept thinking it would get better and it never did.I promptly gave the book away to Goodwill when I was done, and then I had to go back and reread The Blue Sword to get the taste of Dragonhaven out of my mouth.