I was so stoked to read this book. I had only heard whisperings about it going into it so I wouldn’t call it a hyped booked, but I do love Novik’s other seires His Majesty’s Dragons so I had some high expectations.
I liked where this book started a lot. It started with a dragon. But instead of a real fun fire-breathing highly intelligent dragon it’s just some guy who protects the valley with magic and takes a girl as a tribute every ten years. Lame.
But it turned out being pretty cool. I wasn’t a huge fan of the beginning of the book. I found that it was fumbly and awkward and purposefully so which made it all the more infuriating. The main character was made to be fool-hearted and kind of useless and all together more of a lump on a long or, to put it in more literary terms, a plot devise than a real human which I found infinitely annoying. Both her and the Dragon complained endlessly about being stuck together and how they found each other irritating. This is the point where it turns into a romantic story line, right?
WRONG.
I wanted it soooo bad. This whole entire plot ended up being a burden to the real and interesting part of the book; the evil woods that wanted to destroy everyone.
In the end I got very little satisfaction from the characters and the conclusion and the whole middle part. I so wanted to love this book. I did enjoy reading it for the most part, but there were some serious gaps in the story. It had some very fairy-tale aspects that went unexplored.
I guess it was a bit of a let down of a book. There could have been some places that it expanded on that would have been really cool. I rated it a 3 out of 5. The ending was a bit unresolved and if another book was written in the same world I would read it.
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