I picked up a copy of The Stone Dragon and the Moonshine Molly by K.C. Norton and Jordan Riley Swan as an Amazon freebie. I’m not even sure I read the description. I just saw Dragons and such a great cover and went *click.*
It ain’t easy
running a speakeasy
in the dragon roaring ’20s.
Argyle Galloway always follows the rules, no matter the outcome. Without law and order to guide the Dragoncoat riders, the monsters and bugs swarming the Eastern Americas would destroy civilization. But when his dragon starts to shed its scales at the most inopportune time, he must hole up in a notorious speakeasy. The by-the-book Argyle is trying his best to keep on the straight and narrow. Yet he can’t resist the beautiful barkeep who pulls him deeper and deeper into the lawless realm of gangsters and rumrunners—even though she seems more dangerous than the dragon he rides…
Molly Walker wasn’t supposed to follow in her father’s criminal footsteps, but when he dies suddenly, she’s forced to take over his speakeasy or find herself living on the streets. She only intends to work the bar until she can find a buyer for it. Things spiral quickly out of control as clues surface, hinting that the robbery in which her father died might have been premeditated murder. Molly finds herself needing help from the stick-in-the-mud Argyle to solve the mystery, but she doesn’t know which is harder to do: figure out who killed her father while running his illegal bar, or keep herself from falling in love with the stranger who thinks she’s the biggest criminal of them all.
***
It’s the Roaring Twenties—speakeasies are around every corner, jazz is burning up Harlem, and the dragon population is booming. But it’s a lonely job for the brave Coat Wardens who patrol the skies of the Eastern Americas, as love is even harder to hold on to than the dragons they fly…
I’m a little torn about how I feel about this book and that is partially because I don’t think it entirely knows what it wants to be genre-wise. It’s a fade-to-black romance involving new adults (early to mid-20s, one of which is one class short of a college degree and one of which has just finished the draconic version of flight school), but the language the book is written in is a very young adult. I realize it’s the author trying to play up and into cliched 1920s-speak. But it makes the characters feel like children, which then clashes with the adult plot points.
The book is also a little ham-fisted in its portrayal of the characters’ characterizations, Argyle’s especially. This, again, makes that characterization feel very young adult (if not middle-grade) coded. It is as if the author is writing for an audience that cannot be anticipated to identify character traits if they are not very obviously signposted repeatedly.
Outside of my sense of genre confusion, I generally liked the book. I thought the description of the dragons was new and unusual. I liked the characters well enough. And I thought it came to a satisfying (if somewhat sad) conclusion.
Also, as a little sidenote here on my own blog where I can safely be a little snarky, I take issue with the part of the blurb that says, “speakeasies are around every corner, jazz is burning up Harlem, and the dragon population is booming. But it’s a lonely job for the brave Coat Wardens who patrol the skies of the Eastern Americas.” The book is set in Knoxville, Tennessee. I feel like the description sets you up for one thing and delivers another. I have no preference, but I did kind of go “Knoxville? I thought it was gonna be in New York.”
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