Light on the fantasy and plot, heavy on the romance.
Reviewed in the United States on June 29, 2023 | Rating: 3/5 | Best Sellers in Kindle Store
i should start this by saying im not much of a romance novel reader so im probably not the target audience i got it because i was looking through the kindle store at fantasy books and it had great ratings my normal books that i like are more hard magic systems i love very believable characters in solid magic system worlds going through troubles that they may or may not succeed at but that both their strengths and weaknesses carry them through i love worlds that feel very different from ours in believable ways that i can really imaginethis review will not be spoiler free just as an fyi before continuingthings i liked i like the setting and the premise i love a good school story where the main character has to work through politics and enemies and friendships and still learn and grow i love dragon riders i loved her relationship with tairn and i loved how he saw her inner strength and helped make accommodations for her to help her when she wasnt able to stay on his back i wish there was more of their relationship in the book i like the twist at the end it is the one thing giving me hope for a plot in the second book i like that there wasnt a break in the action i loved that the enemy to friends to lovers characters had mated dragons and that they could feel the attraction through them even though i enjoyed hating him for violets sake i actually liked dain as a character moving the book forward he had believable motivations that he stuck to even though his antagonism was mostly surface level towards violet the part that i disliked the most about him is that he didnt evolve really in either direction he didnt start trusting her more she just kept proving him wrong and he kept trying to tell her that she was going to die and going behind her back to try to get her out of the school nothing about the dynamic ever changedthings i disliked the characters were not believable to me they took me out of the experience xadens entire personality was revolved around being extremely attracted to violet and helping her especially in his pov chapter at the end and being a moody guy violets entire personality was getting angry and stubborn and while i absolutely empathized with parts of it because im also a stubborn bitch sometimes it felt very over the top and teenagery in a lot of places this is still personality related but the dragons deserved more the whole book is about being trained to be dragon riders i guess its mainly about the romance but the plot still should be there and we got absolutely nothing about the dragons true purpose we also got very little about tairn and andarna we dont even have a solid reason as to why two dragons chose her except shes special i guess i actually really really liked tairn and would have loved to read more about him and his thought processes but we barely got anything from them also its weird that giant ancient dragons are just at the beck and call of barely 20 year olds i would be willing to put that aside if it seemed like they had more going on and it was developed and explained more or if the rest of the plot captured me more but as is it was explained only in a cursory way the plot was somewhat scattered and haphazard there was a plot there were at times things that seemed relevant but it seemed to be focused too much on keeping the reader in the dark and so it was a bit scattered at times and barely there at others i really wish it had been an actual enemies to friends to lovers story it really didnt read that way at all violet was attracted to him the second that she saw him and xaden was helping her and barely antagonizing her the entire time it felt like a façade of an enemies to lovers story when it was in reality just some edgy people who didnt want to like each other immediately wanting to climb each other like trees the voice of every character sounded the same they swore the same they thought the same they were edgy in similar ways all but liam who seemed to be there only so that he could die he didnt ever really save her from anything either even though he was meant to be her bodyguard he was just there to be a kind person that died for emotional impact it felt like the sex scenes were very long lol i should have expected that in a romance novel but once they started having sex they kind of just didnt stop and then i thought wed get a break and learn more about the plot but then it felt like the very next scene they were at it again dont get me wrong they were very steamy but there was no being left wanting more it was just there for what felt like the second half of the book i dont quite understand why it was brought up that the powers of a person were related to who they were inside if most people just have very generic powers violet included time stopping and lightning destruction seeing things far away control over a basic element it feels like that was just thrown in there to make it so we knew that xaden was very edgy but i could be wrong the timing felt off to me i liked that there wasnt a break in the action but sometimes hours would go by between chapters and other times it would be months really months where nothing at all happened  not a single interesting interaction that could help flesh out a character it just felt weird and the plot and the romance as mentioned before didnt move at equal paces i wish they were more interspersed rather than kind of clumped like they were she was supposed to be a scribe initially but that barely ever came up in any way other than her being smart and understanding tactics it didnt seem like something that she ever wanted or something that she was invested in and felt a little like a contrived plot device to make her seem like a fish out of wateroverall i didnt hate the book but if the second book came out tomorrow im not sure that id read it so that gets it a 3 stars from me i think i may just not be a romance novel person but if you are youll probably enjoy it i know i spent way longer on the things i didnt like about it but there are so many glowing reviews that i figure most people understand what they might like about it if they read those