*happy dance*

I probably shouldn’t write this review yet.

It’s interesting, to read this book so close to reading Iron Flame, because on the surface they are such similar books: a young woman joins a school to become a dragon rider. The book focuses primarily on her experiences with her dragon school, where she is separated from her family, and her struggles with gaining acceptance in a place where she is felt by most to not belong.

Only, like, take that book and shake in a couple of cups of R.F. Kuang’s Babel, which I should remind you was my favorite book of last year, and then make the main character First Nations, and then make the worldbuilding approximately a thousand times more compelling and interesting and carefully thought-out than the Fourth Wing series, and … gimme a minute, I wanna do the happy dance again.

So. OK. This book is 511 pages long and I pretty much read it in two sittings with some sleep thrown in there somewhere, and if you happen to wonder Hey, Luther, did you decide last night that you couldn’t sleep after having your eyes closed for an hour and read another 50 pages before trying again, then I’d have to wonder what the hell you were doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night, because yeah, that happened, and also you’re a weirdo.

Oh, and a big chunk of the book is basically dedicated to the main character’s struggles with chemistry, only it’s magical, dragon-based chemistry, with different words for everything, and the map at the beginning of the book is very much of Earth, and the dominant culture is called the Ainglish, which you would think would map perfectly onto the English only for the bit where the Norse appear to have colonized the world instead of them, because everything’s super Germanic other than the social structure which is pure Victorian Britain, and my God I want Moniquill Blackgoose to write a thorough and unapologetic history of this world and how everything happened because I want to know exactly how much actual history went into this book along with the actual science and gaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh it’s so so so so so good go read it NOW.

I started off by saying I should have waited to review the book, and the reason for that, plain and simple, is that I’m book-drunk right now, on a level I haven’t seen since Jade City came out (!!!), and I can’t pretend this book is perfect, because it isn’t, but I can tell you that every single problem I have with this book comes from my brain and that emotionally I am absolutely one hundred percent in love with this author and her world and I want more right now. A lot of the gripes are of the wait, this doesn’t quite make sense sort of fashion anyway, and I am pretty sure that I trust this author enough to believe that my questions will be answered in future installments. The “shaping” of the dragon’s breath is actually connected to the chemistry– dragon’s breath has weird effects on basic elements in a way that I’m not a hundred percent sure that I understand, but neither does the main character, who maybe??? is a little too good at literally everything??? but that’s another brain-complaint, and sometimes I like reading about cool and competent people who take no shit from anyone and refuse to be rescued, and yeah, I’m gonna compare her to Rey Skywalker, who gets complained about exactly the same way that I suspect some people might complain about Anequs, but who I love as a character in the exact same way too.

God. Why are you still here? Go get this book right now. Maybe I’ll cool off on it a bit– just a bit– in a week or two but you deserve to feel how I feel right now about a book too, so go buy it.