I picked this up because everyone was talking about it and i wanted to understand what was actually happening with it. Sometimes a book gets that level of attention and you read it and you can see exactly why and you feel a bit embarrassed that you were sceptical. This is one of those times.
Violet sorrengail is twenty years old and small and not physically strong and was supposed to go into the scribe quadrant at basgiath war college where she would spend her life around books and historical documents. Her mother is a general and has other ideas. She gets pushed into the riders quadrant where students spend their first year trying not to die before they bond with a dragon and begin actual training. The drop out rate is brutal. The death rate among first years is something nobody in the book talks about comfortably.
The setup works because yarros commits to the stakes. People actually die. more than background characters. People you have spent time with. The riders quadrant is genuinely dangerous and violet being physically disadvantaged is more than a character detail that gets forgotten after the first fifty pages. It shapes everything about how she moves through the world she has been thrown into.
Xaden riorson is the other major character and he is the kind of love interest that fantasy romance readers have very strong opinions about. He is powerful and dangerous and not entirely on violet's side and the reason for that is built into the world's history in a way that is actually interesting rather than just being there to create friction. I found him more compelling than a lot of similar characters in similar books because yarros gives him a consistent internal logic. The things he does make sense for who he is even when they are frustrating.
The romance itself is a slow burn that pays off in the way slow burns are supposed to and i think this is where the book is strongest. Yarros understands that the tension between two people who want each other and cannot fully trust each other is more interesting than resolution and she holds that tension for most of the book. When things do develop it feels earned because you have been inside both of their heads long enough to understand what it costs them.
The world building is large and complicated and i want to be honest that some of it did not fully come together for me until well into the second half. Yarros is building a mythology that is clearly going to span five books and sometimes in this first one you can feel the weight of all the things she is not telling you yet. That is mostly a good thing because it keeps you reading but occasionally it tips into frustrating when something that seems important is dropped without explanation.
The writing has rough patches. I said it in the what i did not like section and i want to say it again here because i think it is worth being specific. The prose itself is not always working as hard as the story is. There are passages that feel like a first draft and some of the dialogue is clunky in a way that better editing could have fixed. This does not stop the book from being deeply readable. It just stops it from being the kind of reading experience where every sentence feels considered. Yarros is a storyteller first and a prose stylist second and if you can make peace with that you will have a very good time with this.
The dragon bonding is one of my favourite things in here. Each dragon has a personality and specific things they will and will not tolerate and the relationship between a rider and their dragon is more than a power upgrade.
