shadowbooker's Reviews (780)

Meghan March never disappoints to get me out of a reading slump. Her books are fast paced, they instantly grab you in and they are hot af. I loved the setting of this book and both main characters, but some homophobic micro aggressions really bothered me even if it was said by a douchy side character, and the twists at the end unlike all her other book, one was quite predictable and the other one made no sense. I still enjoyed it a lot and served its purpose to get me out of a reading slump before I feel deeply into it.

First DNF of the year but I can’t keep doing this. At 70% I dislike the characters and the story is awful. This is a disney channel original movie but instead of the characters being 14 and starting high school, these are grown adults behaving in the most ridiculous ways. 
The plot is laughable, the characters are bland and I honestly can’t waste more time on it.

I don’t even have words to express how AMAZINGLY PERFECT this duology is!!! When I love a first book so much I’m always scared to dive into the second, but the moment I did it I couldn’t put it down! The story only got better and more complex, the characters stayed true to themselves but growing and adapting to the new circumstances, the plot twists were amazing, and we got more Jase which is always a good thing in my book.
@maryepearson delivered a world that’s beautifully built, complex relatable characters, and such a captivating story that won’t let you go until you are finished… and maybe not even then.

Margaret Rogerson just really knows how to do a full world building without info dumping in a standalone!!! This book felt full and complete but never dragged or skimmed over things. The main character was badass and although she had severe trauma she never used it as an excuse to be cruel or evil which was refreshing. Her relationship with all the other characters was funny and wholesome and I loved having a book with so many female characters interacting without the need of men (although there’s a couple and they are cuties too).
Definitely recommend it, and I can’t wait to read more from this author

This was an amazing romcom filled with fanfiction, smut and so many laughters! I loved every second of it, the chemistry between the characters it’s amazing, it kind of has my favorite trope (friends to lovers) and the conversation about fat shaming and ableism was respectful and extremely well done. I loved seeing a confident fat woman loving herself and feeling sexy in her skin and I honestly cannot wait to read more books by this author.

I had to sit down with this review for a while because I wanted to be as fair as possible, so here are the things I enjoyed about this book:
First and foremost I love reading a Latinx author being Latinx myself. I also loved that it was based in Spain and was so culturally rich. Another thing I loved was dragons! And a love interest that shared my same ideals.

What I didn’t like however was that basing the story in Spain the author decided to include bull fighting as “dragon fighting” and glorifying a barbaric tradition along the way when many places in the world are still fighting to end such cruel practices. The way the dragon fighting is described is exactly as you would do it for bull fighting (skimmed of course) and it made me sick to my stomach. 
The author tried to make us side with the humans in the name of dragons being wild dangerous creatures and dragon fighting being an art from and a tradition, going as far as to try to make the protestors of this practices the bad ones, and not once the main character wonders why the dragons behave that way (spoiler alert the humans started the war with dragons and they retaliated), and she does her best to try to keep her dragon fighting arena open.
This brings me to the main character: I just couldn’t like her, she tried to live in her parents shadows while excusing every single thing they ever did, and it just bugged me. I did appreciate that she didn’t sit down to cry and instead took matters into her own hands so there’s that, but she was also incapable of admitting her fathers and even her own faults in what happened during their show and blamed basically everyone else in the book, so the lack of accountability really annoyed me.

Now a little bit of spoilers but it’s important to make a full review: the author is aware of the objectionable practice “dragon” fighting is, hence protestors and a love interest who refuses to kill dragons even though he’s a dragon hunter (still not great, but in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king I guess) and she does fix this somewhat at the end, with the main character changing the whole show and the epilogue showing a more humane relationship with dragons moving forward, but sadly this didn’t happen until I reached 96% of the book and feeling sick to my stomach for 96% of the book prevents me from giving a better rating, which is unfortunate because the author had a fun original idea that if it had focused more on the morality of their actions and not in keeping traditions alive she could have not only have a fun story but a commentary on animal cruelty.

I was given an advance readers copy by Wednesday books in exchange of my honest review