"EDIT: People are comparing this to Dragonriders of Pern + Game of Thrones. It is not. Set your expectation to Harry Potter + Hunger Games, except lazier.

—â¶Ä�

I’ve had a string of bad luck choosing books lately, and this continues that trend. (Although this is a book club read so the choosing part wasn’t mine. But boy is this bad.)

Once again here’s a book that’s way too long. There’s 200 pages of story in this 500+ page tome. It’s tediously repetitive and simultaneously shallow. The main character, Violet, has issues with her overbearing mother. And that’s all we get about that. No real background as to why, not even solid hints about it. This is reflected in every single relationship except for one, but it’s with a minor character, which is such a waste.

This is, hands down, the laziest worldbuilding I’ve ever encountered. It is genuinely dumb, like the author let her 8-year-old kid come up with it. It’s clearly not our world yet everyone talks like they’re a teenager in 2023, even the supposed adults. I’d understand that if the author were a 17-year-old with zero life experience, but Yarros is a grown-ass woman with 6 kids. The countries are completely different yet they have February. Even the lamest Fantasy author comes up with different names for the months. The Heath Ledger film A Knight’s Tale used modern music in a medieval setting, and this almost feels like the same thing, but in the case of that movie it was meant to convey to modern audiences what those times felt like to people living then. () Here the modern way of talking just comes across as lazy and stupid, as if she couldn’t be bothered to put any effort into it. I would not be surprised to learn this was written entirely by ChatGPT.

Dragons are supposed to be a big thing here, except they’re not. There are numerous references to how huge and terrifying they are, and all the fire-breathing. They breathe fire in the beginning, to burn up a person here or there, but in the climactic battle at the end they seem to forget that they can breathe fire almost entirely. Instead it’s the magic-wielding of the riders that’s front and center. (view spoiler)[Violet learns that she’s basically Thor/Storm from Marvel comics, able to call down the lightning. And she does, a lot. Without any limitations at all. Power without limitations is boring. It acts like a Get Out Of Jail Free card that you can play when you get in a jam. This is one of things Brandon Sanderson understands, which is why his magic systems are so highly praised. (hide spoiler)]

I also don’t get all the death. I suppose it’s meant to indicate how high the stakes are, but so many students at dragon-riding school die that it just becomes noise. As the saying goes, “One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.� If you’re in war that absolutely depends on fielding dragonriders, WHY are you so cavalier about kids dying? That’s no way to run an army, not even in medieval times. AND she says there are more dragons than riders. So why allow the kids to kill each other? (Yes, that’s a thing in this book. The students straight-up murder each other, on top of the various accidents due to stupid tests.) (view spoiler)[Violet has fragile bones and weak muscles, I guess to make us feel sorry for her, except her condition comes and goes. She certainly doesn’t suffer any ill effects from the rough sex she engages in, even though the description of their athletic coupling would break her pelvis. Due to her overall weakness she can’t compete in the knife duels they engage in, so she resorts to poisoning her fellow students. And this is the girl we’re supposed to root for. (hide spoiler)]

Prose - yeah, it’s awful. Maybe not Fifty Shades of Grey bad, but it’s a photo finish.

There are a couple of scenes that are straight porn. It was so cringey that I was afraid my mother’s warning of “your face is going to freeze like that� would come true, so intense was my grimace. The second time they started fucking with all the graphic descriptions of cocks and clits, I just skipped ahead a chapter. And yet men are the ones who are depraved. That first sex scene went on so long that I reconsidered my stance against banning books.

And how does a medieval 20-year-old, even a well-read one, know the vulgar word for clitoris? It’s just used here to be gratuitously salacious. Like this and the inclusion of things like February, there are numerous modern references that are simply out of place. In one scene a character does the “tip of the hat� gesture to Violet. Hat-tipping was codified in Western society in England and America in the mid-1800s, when wearing hats all the time was a thing. I don’t even recall anyone wearing a hat in this book. Lazy.

Which brings up the tired trope of enemies-to-lovers. It’s employed in such a ham-fisted way that it was entirely unbearable. These are dumb kids, granted, but it’s so jarring and accidentally hilarious that I was reminded of the exchange in the OG King Kong where Jack and Ann have known each other for like 10 minutes:
Jack: Say, I guess I love you.
Ann: But Jack! You hate women!
Jack: Yeah I know, but you aren’t women.
()
That exchange is actually more sophisticated than what’s in this book. The guy’s nickname for Violet is “Violence�. Oh, swoon.

The narrator is game to go to town on the writing, but for the first half of the book she sounds like she has a cold. She’s perfectly suited to the prose, meaning that she sounds young and inexperienced. It doesn’t help matters that the last chapter is read by a guy who is simply better.

And that last chapter, hoo-boy. Tonally it’s all over the place. It’s all angsty lovey-dovey “but golly-gee willikers we’re enemies again you fuckin� fuck-faced fucktard� and BIG REVELATION, the end, bye."

"This was another one of my series-sampling audio listens, to see if I might want to pursue it in print someday.

Audio Narration
The narrator is Andrew Tell. I liked his narration quite a bit. It was a little slow maybe, but I sped it up to a comfortable pace. Otherwise, he didn’t have any annoying quirks and did well with both narration and character voices. I liked his voice and thought it worked well for the story.

Story
This is a fantasy set on a fictional planet populated by human factions that model aspects of real-world Asian cultures. There is some modern technology, but the story is primarily set in an isolated community with minimal technology. These people are known as the “Sword of Kaigen�, the protectors of the empire, the first line of defense against its enemies. They have magical abilities to manipulate water and its strongest warriors can create weapons made out of ice that are strong enough to cut through steel. There are other people elsewhere on the world who can manipulate other elements. The main POV characters are members of the same family, the most powerful family in this community. We spend most of our time with two characters. One is Misaki, a reluctant wife and mother of 4 sons, with a past that is very different from that of the typical woman in her community. The other is her oldest son, Mamoru who is learning that not everything he was taught is true. And there are hints that enemies may be coming their way soon.

I thought the world was pretty well-developed. The magic was interesting, and had rules that mostly made sense. The characters were written well and they all had depth to them. It was a little melodramatic sometimes, and occasionally I felt like there was a YA vibe even though I wouldn’t consider this a YA story, but mostly I enjoyed it. Despite its length and a satisfying amount of depth to the world-building, the story is straight-forward and so it was very easy to follow in audio. I had trouble keeping the names straight for some of the minor characters, but there was usually enough context to help me.

The story has quite a bit of fighting, with magic and with swords, but there’s a lot of other stuff mixed throughout as well. Misaki in particular has, if not exactly a coming of age tale, a “coming of mature adult� tale. And there is a bit of a coming of age storyline for her son Mamoru also. This isn’t a particularly twisty story, but it took some familiar fantasy elements and then went in different directions with them than what I initially expected. I was caught off guard when (view spoiler)[Mamoru died. I think because we spent so much time with him in the beginning, plus he was more of the traditional epic fantasy main character, plus his gender matched the narrator’s gender, I was thinking of him as the main character for a while. But this was primarily Misaki’s story (hide spoiler)].

This was a mostly satisfying story. Two things I especially liked were: (view spoiler)[1) That the story didn’t just end after the enemy was defeated, but we stuck with them for a long time after that to experience the aftermath, and the rebuilding, and the way everybody’s lives were impacted. 2) That the author didn’t kill off Misaki’s husband to manipulate things so Misaki and Robin could end up together, but instead brought that story to a more believable and satisfying resolution (hide spoiler)]. The one thing I did have some trouble with was (view spoiler)[how quickly Takeru improved, without any serious missteps, after his fight with Misaki. After 15+ years of being cold and distant and disapproving with Misaki, it should have taken more time and effort for him to break that habit of behavior. I don’t think all of his past behavior could be attributed to him “becoming the mountain� nor, if he had been doing that reflexively for all his life, would he not occasionally backslide (hide spoiler)].

Although this is a complete story and there aren’t any cliff hangers, there are some threads left hanging in terms of future threats. There are two other books that were written earlier and, from what I had read when I was initially investigating the series status, she had planned to write more books but has put the series on hold indefinitely. I probably won’t go back and read the series in print in its current state, but I did enjoy this book a lot and I’d like to read the other books if she ever picks it back up and finishes it.

I’m rating this at 4.5 stars and rounding down to 4 on Ĺ·±¦ÓéŔÖ. For me, this is an unusually high rating for an audiobook listen! It’s not a perfect book, and it felt a little unpolished maybe, but I liked the parts of the story that I saw as having more depth and going in a different direction than what I would consider more typical, and the story held my attention very well while I was listening to it."

"I'd happily read it to my kid, or be pleased to see him reading it for himself.

Fun and quick paced, without any creeping cultural ugliness in it.

Also, it's nice to see a good female lead in a kid's book where there's not a big deal made of the fact that she's a girl. I can't stress that enough."