Unfortunately, I didn’t love this as much as I wanted to and this is largely due to pacing throughout. However, I will continue with the sequel because I am interested to learn more but it felt like a bit of a slog towards the end so I wasn’t as invested as I really wanted to be.
Jai is the youngest son of a king whose kingdom was conquered by the mighty Sabines and he is taken as a prisoner of war/ward to keep them in line, along with his two older brothers. Jai spends the next decade or so the manservant of the aged emperor who has now passed on power to his cruel son Constantine and his insufferable Joffrey-esque heir, Titus.
Jai of course is mistreated and is basically nothing more than a slave but when a princess from a kingdom to the north who have dragons, comes down for a political marriage alliance, shit starts to go down. In this regard, as my friend @ladymairreads says, this book slaps balls lol it was dark, it was gross, it was very GRRM with the gruesome deaths etc. and the point where Jai gets his dragon egg was absolutely fxcking insane but I was heeere for it. However, once this initial set up and excitement was over, everything after that went downhill for me.
At one point, after a murder and soon to be assassination attempt, Jai actually sits down to read a journal. Don’t get me wrong, there is a reason for this but the very concept of sitting down and having the time to read when someone is literally going to come through the door at any minute to kill you was extremely wild to me. This lowering of stakes continued throughout the latter half of the book, which really took me out of the story because I knew exactly what would happen the more I read. Jai would travel for a bit with his companions, they’d be accosted by some bad guys, he’d survive just by the skin of his teeth, then repeat. It went on like this for three hundred pages until the very end when he ends up somewhere he never intended to go (but really should have just done this from the start), telling people who he is, and we’re meant to be what…surprised?! Jai while nice enough was a little too naïve for me. Every minute he was getting his feelings hurt and you just wanted to slap his face off! The Brom-esque character (from Eragon for those that don’t know) didn’t even have that good a backstory for him to behave the way he did. How they even found him was weak and for those that have read, why have we not read the fxcking journals yet! Like come one! I wanna know!
Overall, this had some great moments that turned to the ‘I am destined to ride a dragon’ trope on its head but largely, the pacing and low stakes ruined what would have otherwise been an incredible book rather than just a good one.