This book picks up right where the first installment of the Drake Chronicles left off and finally makes good on the first book’s early promises with all the big politics coming into play. Which means it once again leaves me feeling slightly deceived, lol. Because the first book made all those promises and then turned into a cozy slice-of-life about adapting to life at a foreign court and learning new customs and falling in love etc, etc. Now I picked up the next one expecting more of the same, with maybe slightly higher  stakes, but instead there are epic journeys and dragons and battles and an ever-increading number of POVs? Like, none of that is a bad thing, and a lot of it is quite intriguing, but can this series decide what it wants to be, please!

All in all, I feel this is what we used to call romantic fantasy before those words were shortened to romantasy and started defining a specific brand of capital R romance in a magical secondary world setting. It’s a fantasy adventure with elements of a family saga, there are dragons and adventures and drama, and there are also prominent romantic storylines. Eric and Ollie’s continuing love story is the biggest among them, but there’s also Tessa’s love triangle with Eric’s nephews that is steadily getting more tangled, and the evolving tension between Revna and Bryne, and then in the “meanwhile back in Drakewell” chapters we’ve got Amelia and Malcolm, whom I’ve personally been really rooting for, but I digress. What I mean to say, this isn’t a straight-up romance following a single couple, but it’s a very romantic story still and maybe just a bit of soap opera, except in a viking-inspired fantasy land with dragons. A pretty entertaining one at that, my gripes with the slight mood whiplash notwithstanding.

I liked seeing Ollies come more into his own and let his sassy side show more and more, both with Eric and around other people. I really, really liked the exciting worldbuilding developments: between shamans and dragons and necromancy, there was never a dull moment in terms of all these discoveries. And the characters all remain really well fleshed-out. What the book is severely lacking, though, is proper editing. There are a lot of typos and awkward turns of phrase that scream “first draft,” and the narrative itself really begs to be tightened up. Because sometimes, it just goes off on tangents, or there are obvious filler/fluff scenes taking up too much space, and while there’s some great character work in those for the most part, it really messes with the pacing.