Now I'm usually not a fan of sport books, but the fantasy element and use of dragons in said sport was enough to pique my interest. The international competition aspect was interesting, especially as we see all these regional dragon variants and their special kinds of magic. The worldbuilding as a whole is very simple, it's your standard magical spin on our world with magic users and dragons, but non-magical people are in the know, which is a little bit of a refreshing switchup from the usual trope of magical secrecy. Other than that every other tidbit seems fairly standard, which sort of sums up my view on the book.

It's a book that feels like it's just okay. I enjoyed my time reading it, though it felt like it had a few dry spells when it came to keeping my attention. Lana's naivete in the first half was starting to get grating, though thankfully she gets more perspective on her situation as the story goes on and new information comes to light. The other characters, mostly her teammates, could have used more of a spotlight as they started to blend in with the background towards the end. There's this whole theme of Lana regarding them as a family and how they're stronger than ever together, but we got very few scenes of that dynamic and even them some characterizations felt a little hollow. 

On that note, our baddy Sire seems a bit shallow as well. I'm all for villains just being straight up evil for the sake of it, but I felt like there was more potential for a nuanced take of a dragon cursed into human form trying to regain his power. He's certainly threatening, but there's not much to differentiate him from every other bad guy with a god complex. 

I will say that the ending packs a pretty emotional punch and, without giving too much away, I hope that they sort of stick to that landing.

Though it may sound morbid, I do actually like when books stick to "we're going to kill off this character and that's it."  No happy feely resurrection, no magical do overs, this death is going to have a weight on our characters because yes there will be consequences. ESPECIALLY if that death is a potential love interest. I rarely see YA fiction go down this route and it just feels like a nice change of pace.

 

It does make me want to read the sequel just to see what kind of effect it will have and if any interesting development will come of it. Just gimme all the character building trauma.