When I was sixteen, I met the love of my life in magic school. He’d appear exactly once a year at the annual masquerade ball, then vanish…
Fast forward to the present: to the night I’m attacked and my hidden wolf emerges. As it turns out, I’m a freakin’ hairy, tail-wagging, shape-shifting werewolf so instead of returning to the human world after graduating, I’m dragged to Moon Valley to control my inner beast. Only problem is, I’m not just a wolf.
And someone wants me dead because of it.
When I meet the alpha heir, sparks fly, And bombshell– he’s my supposedly wolfy fated mate, but he’s nothing like the boy I loved. He’s cold, sullen, a total jerk but impossibly gorgeous. Of course. And he’s got secrets too. Despite hating him most days, I can’t deny the irresistible attraction… and neither can he. Even after he rejects me.
Little does he known, I’m more than capable of taking care of myself– maybe even capable of taking his claim as alpha.
This is labeled YA/NA, but the character won’t even curse: “Chill the eff out,” for example. So, I’ll let you figure out where it falls between YA and NA. No, I won’t. It’s YA. Now you know.
It’s an OK story. I liked Sierra well enough. She’s a strong protagonist outside of being a mate-bound doormat when it comes to Hunter. But that’s the problem. You see almost no pleasant interludes between them, but she is still slavishly dedicated to him. In the end, I couldn’t root for the romance and didn’t even particularly like him. The side characters are fairly stock, but the world is interesting.
If I had the next one in the series, I would probably read it. But I don’t think I’ll bother buying it.
I believe I won this copy Casey L. Bond‘s Valor somewhere in the wilds of the internet.
Dragon. Warrior. Woman.
To honor her brother’s dying plea, Vayl Halifex carries a message that might prevent war with the location of their captive princess. Fortune and circumstance align in her favor and Vayl’s life is forever changed when an opportunity arises that only she can seize. With the help of a matchmaker, she becomes the emperor’s newest concubine. The new role affords her unfettered access to the gilded mountain stronghold, where the princess is rumored to be hidden away.
But she won’t take this risk alone. Her brother’s best friend, dragon warrior Estin, calls on the small army of elven assassins he leads to use their magic and might to flank her for the fight to come. The band of dragons takes Vayl into their fold and trains her as best they can before she’s whisked away to the palace.
Unbeknownst to the warriors, a dreadful magic simmers in the gilded fortress. With those fiercely protective of the emperor closing in, and the dragon assassins disappearing one by one, Vayl’s chance at escape narrows to a sliver, along with her hope of finding the princess or fighting her way out of the palace. With her heart entwined with that of the dragon warrior she was never supposed to love, she begins to fear the price of her treachery will be her life… or his.
OK, first things first, I was disappointed to discover there were no actual dragons, just a group that calls themselves the Dragons. Not a deal breaker, but it still made me sad. After that initial disappointment, I thought that this was a fine (if unexceptional story). It is, in fact, a fine version of what it is. But that’s also the problem. It’s a fine version of a story that there are 47 gagillion versions of. There’s nothing particularly new. So, if you know you like new-adult (bordering on YA) stories of young women triumphing over adversity to save the day and falling in love on the side, you will likely like this one as much as any other.
Having said all of that, I find myself lately becoming more aware of and on guard against sneakily fundamentalist stories, and I have to wonder if this isn’t one of them. Sure, Vayl has a backbone and fights for what she believes in. But when it comes down to it, she takes all the power offered her and gives it to a man she barely knows so that she can go home and be a wife and, one presumes, mother (given the conversation she has with Estin toward the end).
Sure, she offers up a help-meet to that man…in the form of a mute woman. A woman, I might add, whom Vayl does actually know and trust, who would have made a good leader. Plus, the only other young woman of power left to her own devices goes rogue and evil over a man. I would argue this serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when women are allowed too much freedom and power. They can’t be trusted with it. Then, add the fact that with the exception the Fae queen, literally every other woman in the book is related to serving male sexual desires in some fashion (a matchmaker pimping out concubines, her assistants, concubines, a maid that is hinted to have been a past concubine, a fae assassin in a new and exciting sexual relationship with another fae assassin, etc.) When I really start thinking about it, it’s not even subtle.
None of this is helped by the author thanking God, first and foremost, in her acknowledgements. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with that, obviously. But it does stand as a datapoint when one is looking at a (fantasy) story that so matches the fundamentalist agenda of seeing women as best serving in the home and as subordinate (silent) partners to men in positions of authority. I’m just saying.
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.”