If you know me you know I live, laugh, love dragons. They are one of my favorite mythical creatures and I couldn’t wait to explore them in a new world through the eyes of a new-to-me author. This young adult fantasy was poised to become a favorite, with two sisters doing everything in their power to keep one another safe and alive in a war torn world. 

Unfortunately, I think I picked this book up at the wrong time in my own life. I have had a lot of mental health struggles for most of 2025, and my experience of the book suffered because of that. While I’ll be honest about how I felt about the book I also want you to know that I think my enjoyment and experience would have been a lot different had I been happy, in general, while reading. 

Our story begins a few years after a major war, where the enslaved people defeated their colonizers. The physical and mental scars linger within all the people of this island, including our main characters, Faron, Elara, and Reeve. All our main characters were children during this war where they were present on the front lines. Faron was said to be twelve at the time she gained her power to communicate with the gods and to use their powers through her own body. When our story begins she is in her late teens, still communing with the gods but doing mostly mundane teenager things like going to school and fighting off bullies. 

Faron’s sister, Elara, struggles with not having a name for herself. Under the shadow of her sister she wants her own claim to fame, which she gets in the form of a very unintended consequence, by bonding with a colonizer's dragon. And so begins the crux of the novel. 

I was pretty invested in this story and the world building for about 60% of this book. Once Elara was sent to the mainland my attention started to drift a bit. Her chapters included a lot of information and not a lot of entertainment or excitement. Faron’s chapters weren’t that much better, as we are introduced to a fourth god, who appears to Faron as a boy her own age. 

This is the one part of the novel that I took major issue with. While this character reminded me a lot of the Darkling from Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone series, this hundred or thousand year old god appearing as a young teenager and flirting with Faron gave me the major ick. It’s one thing for a teenage girl to be infatuated with a much older deity and their power, as long as that deity doesn’t reciprocate. In this case the deity was initiating most of these subtle moments and it had my hackles raised the entire time he was around. 

The middle of this book was a bit slow, as both characters are in the learning-more-information phase of the story. The last 15-20% of this novel explodes into chaos, but even that wasn’t able to grab my full attention. I ended up skimming about the last 80 pages just to see how the story wrapped up. 

I think if I had been in a better mood in my regular life I would have had a better time reading this book. Instead I was harshly judging the characters, their actions, and wasn’t able to really settle into the pacing of this novel. I’ve heard the second book in this duology is better than the first, and I would be tempted to reread this later on to give this series a second chance. I enjoyed the worldbuilding, the writing, and how fleshed out every character was. They all had very distinct voices, and were presented as a diverse and LGBT cast, which I appreciated. Overall I’m glad I gave this one a chance, I just wish I had been in a better mood while reading it.