Seraphina

This wasn't a bad book, but I wish it had done just a bit more.

By far the best part of this book was the deep xenophobia that humans had against dragons and dragonkind. I found it interesting that the author chose to make them distinctly other as a species, instead of just basically humans who can take on another form. Their lifestyle and way of both approaching and experiencing the world is distinctly different and while that fact isn't the driving force of the prevalent bigotry against them, it definitely contributes.

But that also contributes to one of the things I didn't like about the book: Seraphina was a bit too lax about hiding her half-dragon status for how violently bigoted society is against dragons as a whole. She mentions frequently that she wears multiple layers to hide the scales on her arms but...that's it? At the very least she should wrap a bandage or some sort of cloth specifically around that spot on her arm if the only thing that would cause her to be discovered was for someone to roll up her sleeve. There's even literally a scene where she faints and after she comes to someone tells her that they considered removing layers to help cool her down. It would've been that easy for them to discover the scales and kill her while she was unconscious. Not to mention when the Princess catches sight of the scales on her back and she plays it off as being a girdle or something: why wasn't she ACTUALLY wearing a girdle to hide those scales just in case? She just seems very cavalier about not even doing the bare minimum to protect herself from being discovered. She's completely relying on just her everyday dress to hide her secret and it comes across as fairly reckless for someone who wants to keep their secret as bad as she does.

The other thing I didn't like is that the romance pretty much came out of nowhere. There was two, possibly three moments where I thought “Ok it looks like she might be developing feelings for this guy, I'm interested to see how this will work out.” And then there's a scene where she confesses to herself that she's in love with him? There was barely even any buildup for her LIKING him but LOVE? It completely took me off guard cause the construction of those feelings was just NOT there in the book before this. They had barely even spent any time together before she decided she loved him. There weren't any hints on the other side of things that he was developing feelings for her either. This could be excused that there were no chapters in his pov so it would've been harder to notice but we should still see SOMETHING hinting to it.

Generally I didn't vibe with the way this story seemed to be going. It seemed a bit frazzled to me. It wasn't bad, and it kept me entertained enough to not DNF, but I'm definitely not continuing the series.