The Summer Dragon

You know, I have serious issues with the way many authors handle teenage characters and their relationships with the adults surrounding them. I find it especially bad with teen girl protagonists, so when I saw this had a teen girl as a protagonist, then I found out it was first person narrative... lets just say I wasn't too excited.
It seems I had a good reason for it.

Maia's family lives out in the mountains in their little village, being the local dragon breeder clan, providing animals for the country's dragon division in the army. Right now some other country is trying to attack them, stealing their dragons and turning them into strange, sinister Horrors, just all around wrong, demonic dragons with equally horrible riders.
When Maia and her brother see the Summer Dragon, one of the figures of the local religion, she feels it is the sign she needs to claim her own dragon, but of course things go wrong and some religious messing around ensues, with Maia as the centre of it all.

I will be honest, the reason why this got 2 stars was that I absolutely loved the beginning that showed people dealing with dragons. Cleaning up after them, feeding them, just generally making you feel like we're talking about real animals. They didn't feel distant, magical things, but perfectly plausible animals like horses or dogs. Just... bigger. And with the ability of flight. And can speak a tiny bit. Okay, whatever, I get it, but as close to normal animals as we can get.
Something about the routine-like way of the people working with them was pretty nice and for some time I thought this was going to be awesome, no problem with it at all.

But we had Maia. Teen girl. Extra magical. Better than everyone. Gets in trouble all the time, but it's good, she is right, she is morally superior. More competent than anyone. Oh, she endangers people with her ridiculous wilfulness? It's all okay, Maia is the chosen one and being rational and ready to compromise is not how she should be, because things will all sort themselves out to make Maia right at the end.
Then of course her perfection doesn't stop in the face of any adult; adults are there to be either useless or evil, so Maia can shine and school everyone. The only exception is Jhem, her sister-in-law, who also fucks up a lot and at the same time she is so much better and such a little victim of everyone being angry when her weakness causes her dragon to harm people. Also, she has a fetish of squeezing Maia's hand every 2 minutes. Whatever happens, squeeze the hand and it's fine.
A conspiring government priest man called Bellua is the antagonist, who is such a shitstirrer and Maia is convinced he'll totally rape her because he looked at her boobs. I mean it's inappropriate, but we went from him glancing at her to “100% rape at any minute tho, #truth” at the speed of light.
The rest of the characters are so forgettable, it hurts.

Which is extra horrible, as there are parts of the book when everyone is at the same place, talking and doing things at the same time, with all the names in the span of a couple of sentences. If you have any issues with remembering fantasy names... I don't envy you. When dragon names AND official titles also mix in, I just wanted to headbutt someone.

We got some really sweet illustrations, though. Mr. Lockwood is a fantasy artist, so of course he put in some of his work and man, I appreciated it. They fit to what I imagined, which tells me the descriptions were successful.
Honestly, other than the name overload in places the prose was fine. I was okay with it and without other issues, I could have been fine with reading a whole series in this style. Even the first person would have been okay if it wasn't Miss Magical Perfection, but someone else. Even Total Actual Rapist I Swear Guy, I would have loved to see if his religious crazy was honest or just him trying to get power and influence.

The pacing, though... not to my liking. According to my estimation about a fifth of the story or so was spent on this one long sequence of events leading to something you KNEW was happening. The characters struggling in caves, enemies, running, OMG, dragon is coming, etc. It was a repetition of the same issues, drawn out, especially frustrating when it was just the road connecting between the beginning and an obviously inevitable thing.
(Can we talk about Maia being annoyed about her brother suffering life-threatening injuries and serious bloodloss not being as competent as she is towards getting the thing she wanted? Dude is bleeding out and he DARES to drink a lot of water, the jerk.)

I will be honest, this book is not for me. It's just way too YA and inhabited by characters I dislike for one reason or another. I loved the dragons, not so much the riders. A shame, as I was pretty excited about the story.

Good evening and for now I am content with just having a dog, thanks.