mediocrity and beans.
i really think this premise had such great potential, and almost nothing substantial was done with it.
the main character, alex green, was boring. she had almost no personality to me. no backbone, no interesting plot developments in the middle of the book, nothing. at the start of the book i do think she was a good narrator, and within the last like 10% of this book i think she served her role, but god was the middle a slog! nothing fucking happened! ok well things did happen. but it was super monotonous. im sorry how is ur book boring when youre premise is that WOMEN BECOME DRAGONS. how do you fuck it up that bad. seriously thats such a golden idea and instead i have to read about the 45th time of alex puttering around. like honestly after the apartment is introduced up until the last 20% of the book i cannot recall anything truly meaningful happening. at least nothing meaningful enough to warrant such a large portion of the book dedicated to alex making a stew or telling the reader for the umpteenth time beatrice is wild or her dad's an asshat or the librarian is the only intriguing character to come out of this story. im gonna say it. miss gyzinska shouldve had a bigger role and a lot more time dedicated to her story. 
i was interested in this book for two overarching reasons - it has the LGBT+ tag and seeing the in-universe explanations and mechanics of dragoning. and guess what. guess. fucking. what. i was let down on both ends. now little bit of spoiler territory here but im not tagging it so live with it 🤷
how dare you tag this book LGBT+ and have like 4 pages with gay people. HOW DARE YOU. (/j) im sorry in my mind to tag a book LGBT+ you need a lot more than this book gave. are you serious in telling me a side character is gay for like. 4 pages. fucks off for 90% of the book. comes back and gets a passing mention of their gayness. REALLY. and then the only other gay character literally kisses someone of the same sex ONCE, and is gay for TWO CHAPTERS IN THE END, and then in the epilogue theyre married to someone of the same sex. no. dont you dare. this is not a lgbt+ book. its a book with lgbt+ characters sure! but saying "characters" is really pushing it considering every body has the personality of a thumbtack. and dont try me with the "dragoning is an allegory for being gay" or sm. no. shut up.
and the science.... damn. i got nothing there. the little excerpts were interesting sure, but after a while everything surrounding dragoning became repetitive, stale, and amounted to "uhhh nobody knows why this happens". AND THAT NEVER GETS RESOLVED. and ur main character is a fucking scientist. and half of the cast are also scientists. are you for real. ARE YOU FOR REAL.
now you know how i love me some tension. and even though i love to bitch that a book is boring because there's no stakes, sometimes character writing can keep the book going without a strong plot. but honestly this book wasnt good on either aspect. the plot was predictable and flat, and the characters were all nothingburgers. honestly even the librarian wasnt that great. just comparing to everyone else she kinda ate. but if i compared her to literally any other book with decent character writing she would flounder. although i do have to bring mention to beatrice - yet again for this book she sucked. but her sucking was unique. where everyone else sucked because they were as interesting as watching paint dry, beatrice was interesting because she annoyed me in the end. throughout the novel she was fine, but following prom, she kind of reminded me of when someone writes self-insert fanfiction in a fantasy world and they so clearly overpower their mc. beatrice kind of reminds me of the god-made sue trope. if youve read this book, go look that up lmao.
what else can i say. i dont know why im giving this 3-stars. maybe because i thought the character development of alex & beatrice was nice? maybe because i liked seeing the change in society from the start and the end of the story? i dont know. all i do know is i feel cheated out of my promised gay book. three queer kisses is not nearly enough for the LGBT+ tag.