Author: Rebecca Yarros
Pages: 517
Publisher: Entangled: Red Tower Books
Publication date: May 2, 2023
Goodreads synopsis
Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.
But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.
With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.
She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.
Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.
Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.
Thoughts
Okay, BookTok. I'll give it to you. I bought this fully expecting it to fall short of the hype, because you can't trust everything you see on the internet, but I get it. I understand the hype. I can't remember the last time I flew through the pages of a fantasy book as fast as this one. There are so many things I really liked about this book. I loved the connection between the dragons and their riders. I loved Tairn's personality and Andarna's contrast from him. The interactions between the three of them were so fun to read. I liked the setting of the war college, I liked the relationships between the other cadets. And of course, I really liked Xaden.
I enjoyed the relationship between Violet and Xaden. I wish the enemies part of the promised enemies to lovers trope had lasted a little bit longer, just to really build some tension, but other than that, I looked forward to the Violet and Xaden scenes.
One of my only gripes with this book is that Violet is not a very interesting protagonist. The characters that she interacts with all have personalities, so I feel like it's easy to overlook that Violet doesn't have one.
Reading about how small and fragile she is does get old pretty fast. I have come to understand that she is breakable because she has a disability, however, this is not stated in the book, and if I hadn't read other's reviews of this novel, I may not have put together that she was disabled. So many protagonists are written to be small and fragile without being disabled that it would be easy to lump her in with those, which is really a shame. If it was framed differently, the disability representation would have been amazing.
The only other thing I would say may be difficult for readers is the striking similarities between this story and other fantasy material. I know completely original ideas are hard to come by these days, and I think this book was marketed as Divergent meets GoT, but I think it's important to note that it really is just Divergent with dragons and sex scenes. I am not complaining, but if you're looking for something all new and groundbreaking, this might not be the book for you.
Overall I really enjoyed this novel and BookTok did steer me right this time. I'm going to continue with this series despite my lukewarm opinion on Violet. I have hope that throughout the series she'll become someone actually interesting, but until then, there's more than enough dragons to distract me from her.
