I’m a big fan of fantasy fiction so I was excited to dive into this new world created by Samantha Shannon. Like any literary world building project there is a lot of geography to master. The complexity of this world and the various geopolitical relations were so hard for me to follow at the beginning that I almost gave up.

The story centers around several main female characters. Tane, a dragon rider from Seiiki, an Eastern Kingdom. Ead who is a lady in Queen Sabran’s court in the western kingdom of Inys. Loth, Ead and Sabran’s male friend, is sent away by the Inys spymaster to serve as “ambassador” to the mysterious Draconic Kingdom of Yscalin. The last Inyist ambassador to Yscalin never returned and Loth is supposed to find out why.

This is a land of dragons. There are good dragons (who like water and breath wind), and bad dragons (who breath fire). The biggest baddest dragon is the Nameless One who was captured beneath the Abyss Sea 1000 years ago. Everyone agrees the Nameless One is bad but not everyone agrees how he was captured and who did it. Whole religious are built up around this origin myth and the tensions between the virtuous and the infidels stems from disagreements about this herstory.

Signs appear that the Nameless One may be emerging from his containment and individuals try to move nations to come together to fight him. Miraculously they succeed and ancient enemies come together for the big battle against the big bad dragon in the end.

The somewhat simplistic good versus evil narrative is not unusual for the genre. What is unusual is that Shannon packs into one book what could easily be more thoughtfully developed in 5 (or 12, as in The Wheel of Time). This information density makes the book sometimes hard to follow and other times hard to believe. Conflicts are resolved too easily. Secret hidden magical objects appear the first place they are looked for.

The feminization of this narrative is the more interesting and atypical aspect. All the protagonists are women except for Loth, the token sensitive guy. The women get all the action – they fall in love (with each other), have mad passionate sex, they ride dragons, they discover magical jewels that only they can control, they eat magical fruit which gives them special powers, and they work together to change the world.

In spite of this breezy review I was still sucked into the story. But I would have preferred a little longer journey, with the loose ends not quite so neatly wrapped up. I give this book 3.5👍 out of 5👍.