Full review and reaction video.

Lots of people will tell you this is fun. I'm here to tell you that this isn't good. In fact, it was so bad that I had absolutely no fun reading it. I mean, I did laugh a lot but AT this book and certainly not with it.

This is a book about a military academy that lots of young adults are conscripted into and then they die in terrible sometimes gruesome ways. Despite that, the words you'll hear most often associated with this book in positive reviews is FUN and FLUFFY. How can this be about the horrors of a war college and fun and fluffy? That's because it doesn't make sense, the world is underdeveloped, nothing that happens matters much, but there is the most stereotypical, personality-less brooding bad boy you ever did see within convenient banging distance of the main character.

I'm very perplexed by the entire project (as described by the imprint) of "the glory days of YA but spicy and aged up." I just feel like if your project is Hunger Games, but spicy, something has gone irreparably wrong.

In this book, I'd even challenge the "aged up." Our main character is 20, but you could move this entire story to Dragon Riding High School and nothing about the book would have to change. Nothing about the characters, the themes, or the language would change. I can't help but feel that this is YA behind the curtain and in front of the curtain, it's characters are juuust old enough so adults feel cool with the sexy scenes. And to be clear, YA is often and can be good. This is NOT good, but it is YA and calling it any form adult is a stretch.

Apart from all of that, I could not have a good time with this because of how distractingly bad it is.

The first 30% of this book was truly painful for how poorly it laid out the world and the stakes are. It's a world that is underdeveloped outside of the war college, and yet the work painfully knocks the reader over the head with empty and disconnected world building facts. I don't need my fantasy romance to have an intricate world. I also love low-stakes fantasy or character driven fantasy. This is none of that. This is high stakes fantasy that failed at convincing me of the states or building a world to support it. This is a fantasy romance that wanted to focus on the romance but spent so much time calling attention to its flimsy fantasy world. This is a story that forgets it's own rules and what it already explained to us for the sake of over-inflated conflict.

I will never be over:

1. The main character reciting facts to calm her anxiety, which is cute and in fact a great way to break an anxiety spiral. Unfortunately, she's not reciting random facts, like the monarchs of the kingdom, or the flora of the city. The author has her RECITE RELEVANT WORLD BUILDING FACTS. If this were the only clunky thing in a book that otherwise world built well, I'd forgive it, but it's just another bludgeon in a work interested in beating you well and good.

2. The dialogue. It's so unnatural. This isn't a book where you can turn your brain off because it's smooth and well delivered. It's a book where you have to turn your brain off because the story refuses to let you have a single thought it doesn't shove down your throat. It's a book that refuses to trust you one bit. The dialogue is full of characters saying things to each other that have nothing to do with the dialogue it makes sense for them to have and everything to do with the information the author couldn't figure out how to get to the reader otherwise.

3. There is a scene on the sparring mats where we learn that the antagonist is allergic to oranges because a character just walks in eating an orange and offers him some while he's mid-threatening-to-kill-the-main-character. And then he announces to everyone present that he's allergic to oranges and goes back to threatening the main character.

It's like this the entire time.

In addition to the bad world building, I cannot get over the fact that the premise BARELY makes sense. You have this war college where people go to train, but also, before they train anyone, they kill off a bunch of the incoming cadets??? And people just keep dying left and right because apparently the best way to run a perpetual war is to kill off young people indiscriminately. There is no infantry? No one needs to work at the college? There aren't other places these people could contribute to the kingdom or perpetual war? Also, the dragons are really picky about who they bond with and the bond is super special and life long, except the dragons also often just let their bonded riders fall to their death if they slip off their smooth backs while the dragons are doing twirls and whirls in the sky. Also, dragons often just get pissy and roast another dragon's bonded rider alive and no one has anything to say about that?

The dragons are, arguably, the best part of this. That is truly because they are as one-note as all the other characters, but it works better for the non-human characters.

The comparisons to the Hunger Games are terrible (again, especially as people talk about how FUN this is) because the violence in THG had a POINT. It was central to what was happening in those books. The violence here is often mentioned but in such a disconnected way. There could've been commentary on the inherent violence of a military complex, but trust me, this isn't that. There is no commentary here. It's just like "wait, older dystopian YA usually had a lot of death, right? Right." Essentially, this book quickly develops a Red Shirt problem.

There is so much about this that is either incredibly nonsensical or suuuuper convenient. Like cadets can't hurt each other, except for when they can. Our main character is always sneaking out and conveniently in positions to get super secret information. Our main character inherits a book with War College instructions, and it's helpful when it's convenient and forgotten when it's not. Apparently, no one in this entire world or Dragon Academy knows what a baby dragon looks like. Some cadets randomly decide to kill a dragon I guess just because they don't like its stupid face but mostly because the plot needed them to. Our main character forgets how competitions work but mostly so her team can fall behind in the rankings because the plot needed them to. It's an onslaught of nonsense.

The writing itself is simple at the best of times and then randomly clunky and convoluted. My general impression is that this was not edited enough or for nearly long enough. There were so many things that could've been fixed with a stronger editing hand, not only on a line edit basis, but developmentally as well. This was also weirdly anachronistic. I say that, but truly is it? Because I have no real sense of the world. But it's a dragon fantasy where they use like inkpots and quills, but use the Gregorian calendar. And the conversation and vocabulary is exactly the kind you could hear from millennials at a Starbucks. In the acknowledgements, the author references a rushed 21-days to "finish" editing, but my personal belief is that this only ever saw 21 days of work, period.

So, if the world is bad and the plot is bad and the writing is bad and everything is bad, then the romance must be where it's at, right?

lol.

I found Violet and Xaden to be pretty flat. Violet, as the first person narrator, gets a little more of a personality, but she is truly just so generic. I also didn't feel like we got a proper arc for her, though we do get told a lot that she's changing. She trains a lot and gets physically stronger, but that's not really an arc. We are also told over and over again how smart Violet is but homegirl misses EVERYTHING in this book. She's loud and wrong the whole time. She has multiple ways that people are trying to clue her into what's going on at War College and miss ma'am is picking nothing up. I felt like I was a million miles ahead of her the whole time, which in addition to not being a reading experience I personally find fun, is made even more annoying by the fact that everyone keeps telling us how smart she is.

Spoiler

It's even worse when you realize that literally everyone has been lying to her the whole time. And the thing she is missing out on is that Military College of the War Regime is bad, actually.

Xaden is a bunch of nothing. Because he's our resident brooding bad boy, we get to learn nothing about him other than he's hot and aloof and brooding. There is a hilarious moment almost 70% of the way into the book where Violet realizes she knows nothing about this man and asks him what his favorite food is. I mean, maybe that's someone else's idea of a good romance, but it certainly isn't mine.

I was also super uncomfortable with the fact that their first kiss and truly horny scene is under the influence of their dragon's lust. Their bonded dragons are having sex so Violet and Xaden get horny. It makes so much less sense when you realize that Violet's dragon maybe did this on purpose??? He chose that moment to start channeling to Violet and then just went off to have dragon sex???? LIKE SIR. WHY WOULD YOU.

The pacing of the romance over all was very weird. So much happens in the last 30% of it, where previously, it was just all Violet thirsting after this man while he robbed her of agency, forced the stupidest, most terrible nickname on her against her will, and occasionally caused her physical harm.

The best thing I can say about this is that the ending is probably the best part. It almost leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth, but only if you forget the hundreds of pages of pain it took to get there.

This also does have disability rep. While I have a chronic condition, it isn't associated with chronic pain, so I can't comment on if this "good rep" and or "bad rep." My impression is, however, that this rep was rather shallow. I wish we would've seen more of Violet confronting her internalized ableism, or like days where she was physically unable to train or lacking in spoons, or even more of the impact of her disability as there were so many layers of plot armor around our girl that it often felt like I couldn't tell what was chronic pain related or what was being beat up at Murder College related. I am glad that something with this rep is gaining success and my best hope is that this mean we'll see more and better disability rep in the future. I can understand if this worked for disabled readers for sure, but this was my impression of it.

Listen, I love a fun read as much as the next girl. I prefer my fun reads to actually be fun though.