Thank you Tor for the gifted ARC in return for my honest review.

Unfortunately, this was a bit of a disappointment for me. It’s a very straightforward classic dragon story; a knight is on a quest to prove themself by defeating a powerful dragon and retrieving a magic sword for its den. The thing is, it was just too straightforward to be very compelling, at least for me. There was some interesting elements added, like flashbacks that expanded the world a bit and some pieces of inworld history of past knights on dragon quests. I’m a bit conflicted on whether I think the history tidbits even really added to the story or if they could have just been omitted to up the pace. The ending improve my rating however, while I had predicted some of the twists pretty early on, the story took a turn that I wasn’t expecting and made me much more interested in reading the sequel when it comes out than I was before. Unfortunately, that came way at the end and didn’t fix the slow pacing and unremarkable plot that plagued the majority of the story, but it was definitely an improvement.