I’m very torn with this review, because on one hand I loved this story, the characters, the relationships and the world building. But on the other hand the pacing felt very uneven and some characters were not given enough time to be fleshed out. As someone else said don’t come for the dragons or good pacing but do come for the sapphic love story and an epic fantasy world 👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩🐉

The things I loved was the beautiful world building, the sapphic love story that had me in all the feels and the complex plot that had lots of twists and turns. I also loved all of the powerhouse women in this story, the commentary on misogyny and the deconstruction of religion.

What I didn’t love was that the character who rides a dragon was not fleshed out enough and so her story fell a little flat. Which was really disappointing because I really wanted to be immersed in her world.

Also the pacing was all over the place. It took about 150 pages to build the world and establish all of the characters, then it took almost the rest of the book to build up the action which was had and resolved in less than 100 pages. It just felt way too rushed at the end and also there were no stakes, anytime a task needed to be completed there would be this big build up to it and then all of a sudden it was completed and we were moving on. I think this would have been better as an epic series rather than one book because then we could have really gotten into the nitty gritty of the world and character building, the side quests and the big battle that everything was leading towards.

All in all it was a good book that I enjoyed reading but I was a little underwhelmed because it could’ve been epic!