I’d like to begin with the warning that I would not classify this book to be under dark academia, nor slow-burn enemies to lovers. Yes, our main character spends a great deal of time within a school-like setting, but it is not dark academia - in fact, a good portion of this book is barely focused on the academia portion at all. Instead, we spend a great deal of time with our main character trying to decide between her morals and her family, with the work she is doing taking a much-more backseat to the story. As well, her romantic lead and her fairly quickly move to involving themselves with one another, and the closest we get to ‘enemies’ is them having different backgrounds and occasionally disagreeing with them. They are never actually enemies, and the only way I could see this as being “slow-burn” is if you include the fact that they don’t have sex and barely kiss within this novel, which is not what that word means. I feel like this description might have been written by someone who has not read this book, so I would recommend looking elsewhere if that is the only thing about this book that caught your interest as you will be sorely disappointed. 

I have not read Fourth Wing, so I can’t speak on any comparisons people have made with that book and this one. I have, however, read Babel and can say I can see where the comparisons come from, but I would say that Babel focuses much more on the actual language/magic learning in the academic setting, while this one has it much more as a background activity to the rest of the novel. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I found some of the focus on the language in Babel to bog me down a bit, but I do think this book would have benefited from focusing more on the main character being a polyglot - in both human and dragon languages. We are only given a few words in this book that aren’t in English, even during sections where she is not speaking in English, and at times I found it difficult to pick up what language she was speaking until the text explicitly states it. Considering she only speaks to her mother in Bulgarian, and typically switches languages in the middle when speaking with dragons, I think having a bit more focus - and possibly a few words/language learned - would have benefited this story. As it is, there is no difference between this main character being a polyglot and someone who only speaks one language. The closest we get to Robin Swift’s dilemma in Babel about what language he thinks/breathes in, which one is his “first” and “second” language - is at the very beginning where she wakes up thinking of a word in a dragon language that she can’t immediately translate. Otherwise she seems to have no issues speaking over 6 languages and never flubs her words, or mixes up words from the wrong language, which I found to be a bit unrealistic. 

It also takes Vivian significantly longer than Robin Swift in Babel to actually choose her morals (about 70% into the book), and yet somehow she was able to make friends and acquaintances have faith in her and trust her with secrets that could get them executed. Her main romantic lead even states that he had faith in her the entire time, despite her telling him over and over again that she would choose her family over the rest of the country. Every single time you thought Vivian was going to (finally) make a decision on who to choose, she’d waffle about it and then choose both and neither at the same time. It got tedious after a while, and I’ll be honest I was almost hoping she’d decide to betray everyone around her to get what she wanted as it would have at least made her character more interesting. Instead, she is allowed to constantly make bad decisions that hurt those around her, but is then forgiven for them anyway.

For instance, in the past Vivian had done something that had ruined her former friends life - but when it comes out, it doesn’t take that friend too long to forgive her actions. It also annoyed me that Vivian’s apology kind of felt like she tried to guilt Sophie into forgiving her, by constantly going, “It’s okay if you don’t forgive me, I wouldn't either.” But then she ruins it by finishing with saying that she’d find a way to forgive herself for those actions - apologizing but then telling that person that you’d forgive yourself for hurting them? Surprised Sophie didn't deck you for that one, girl. 

 

Finally, I felt like this book went a bit too far with the implication that every dragon from Bulgaria was a human-hunting evil monster, despite the fact that the main dragon character was Bulgarian and had severe guilt over her actions in the past. Not to mention that we find out that a lot of those previous evil actions were actually orchestrated by a human government who used the feelings of betrayal of those dragons to manipulate them into doing such violence. It doesn’t absolve it, but it does make it seem a bit suspicious that even after finding this out, our main character still sees Bulgarian dragons as untrustworthy. Vivian even explicitly states that, “Bulgarian dragons don’t ally with humans,” despite working with one this entire time. 

Overall, I did feel like this book was a strong debut and did fairly well with the issues brought up in this novel, and I am interested in seeing what comes next. If you like political intrigue, betrayals and secret identities, and dragons (although, much less involved than you’d expect given the title), I would recommend picking up this book and seeing for yourself.