Conscripted into train in the dragon army to fight against neighboring states, a young woman battles her insecurities and lack of power, while trying to resist temptation of the one man she should not fall in love with –the man who killed her brother.

Well written, with an excellent main character and a lot of interesting side characters. I loved the world we’re thrown into, and the first person narrative gives us a lot of information without being dumped on. The powers that come from the pairings is a nice twist on the concept, without trampling on X-Men style mutations the way other books have done. I don’t think I’ve ever read romantasy before, and while I loved the fantasy portion, the romance didn’t work as well for me. The early parts of the book were most jarring, as it felt shoved in when Violet gets easily distracted by the antagonist, wishing she wouldn’t get flushed by the sight of him, but wanting him nonetheless. There is a lot of will-they-or-won’t-they, which I found more annoying than tension-building. While everyone else is hooking up because they don’t know if they’ll survive the next day, she’s saving herself for a man she hates, just to satisfy the romance plot. They seem to be the only ones who think there must be a future in their relationship for them to have sex. Regardless, it gets better once they do hook up, and the sex is surprisingly graphic and honest. First and foremost, though, this was a book about characters, acceptance, and flexibility, all of which it showcases very well.

This book starts like The Hunger Games, progresses into some Divergent plotting, then goes Harry Potter until it finally moves onto its own footing. The author does all of this with super strong characters, both the mains and the side ones, human and dragon. Everybody is distinct and their motivations are clear, even if some are required to be one note.

I’ve never read romantasy before, didn’t know such a thing existed. At first, I wasn’t impressed by the romance part, which seemed shoe-horned in. Every time Violet thinks of Xaden, the son of a rebellion leader and enemy of her family, she gets hot and flustered, which distracts from the story. When they finally do get together, my thoughts were that it was about time, rather than the moment of satisfaction I think most romance readers would feel. It took too long to get there.

I was surprised by the graphic detail the author goes into during the sex scenes. It was refreshing and I think intentionally titillating to get such honesty where most books would shy away from going so far. At this point, they got their fair share of intimate time.

The fantasy world is very well established, with a country defending its borders, conscripting youths (as in The Hunger Games) into a dragon army. The twist here is that Violet was preparing all her life to be a scribe, but when her father died her mother forced her to switch into the much more dangerous role. She crosses the narrow parapet in the rain (similar to Divergent’s leap into the chasm) with new enemies already on her tail, from Xaden to Jack, who promises to kill her every time we meet him.

One of the squad leaders is a longtime friend, Dain, and she pines away for him through the early parts of the book, doing nothing about her need. But Dain is annoyingly fierce about the rules, so it was fun to see him frustrate Violet, as he’s her senior officer so refuses to get intimate, though if she pushed harder I'm sure he would have given in. Her quips were funny as she halfheartedly tried to seduce him early on.

Throughout her schooling, Violet makes friends easily, such as Rhiannon and Ridoc, some of whom survive, while others don’t. Her friends have no problem hooking up for casual affairs, following the tradition of that quadrant, born out of the fact that a huge percentage of them will die before graduation. Violet has had sexual encounters before, so it’s suspicious when she tells herself that she’s saving herself for Xaden, and even more so when Xaden refuses because there can be no future between them. Nobody else seems to expect a long-term relationship, and we aren’t given any indication that Violet would normally be opposed to casual flings. This becomes, unfortunately, a plot convenience to keep them apart until much later in the book.

Regardless of the minor annoyances, the fantasy elements kept me entertained. I loved watching Violet poison her opponents, get help strengthening her muscles and improve with the staff. Her dagger-throwing skills were already excellent, and she makes good use of them. The theory behind the dragon rider quadrant is that the weak shouldn’t proceed, so the strong and ruthless make sure the herd is thinned. Violet has to survive several threats to her life, but thanks to her superior strategic skills, her sister’s dragon-scale armor, and protective friends, she makes it through.

There are physical obstacles in the way, too, like the long and difficult climb up the gauntlet, which she can’t do the normal way because she’s too short, and the walk through the dragons –some of the dragons actually eat the cadets on the field! The bonding rite is what they’ve all been trained for, through strategy lessons and physical tasks. Violet moves to protect a small dragon from the bullies who try to injure or kill her, and that earns her the bond between not only the feathertail (Ardarna), but also a massive dragon named Tairn.

Complicating matters is that Tairn is a life-mate with Sgaeyl, who happens to be Xaden’s dragon. The bond between life-mates gives them more intimate contact, especially when the dragons are in heat, and allows them to speak into each other’s’ minds. Because of this bond, Xaden shows up to protect her in the middle of the night to kill the cadets who try to kill her in her sleep.

Like Red Queen and so many books these days, the bond between dragon and rider gives rise to special powers. As in X-men, some can command ice and fire, others can read minds, and Xaden can command shadows. Violet’s power doesn’t manifest until much later in the book, and when she calls down lightning to save a friend from Jack, incinerating him, she nearly passes out from all that power.

Then she comes down from that high, and the low of discovering that she killed somebody, just as Xaden appears. Their sex was accompanied by funny offhand observations, like the way her lightning destroyed most of the furniture in her room, and the trees outside. The banter is great throughout the book, from many of the characters. From this moment on, the sex and thoughts of sex increase, and it’s all very graphic, as if the floodgates have been opened. Just when the book threatened to get dull, it spiced things up again.

Not only is Xaden in love with Violet (whether he says it or not), he has a vested interest in keeping her alive, as the belief is that if she dies, he will also die, through their dragon bond. So he continues her teaching, getting up close and intimate on the sparring mat, and making her special daggers.

We spend a lot of time on the sparring mat, and in the battle techniques, making this book less school-intensive than Harry Potter. The author did a great job of interspersing teaching information with class banter, usually based on the one-note side characters, who did their job well.

Because of her bonds with Xaden, Tairn and Andarna, Violet is privy to many different secrets. She sees Xaden and the other children of the rebellion leaders gathering illegally, discovers Andarna’s gift of being able to stop time when her life is threatened, figures out that feathertails are actually immature dragons, and learns that Xaden is sneaking away to a city outside the dragon wards for an unknown purpose. Because of her association with the scribes, she volunteers to exchange books and missives for the dragon quadrant, where she accidentally discovers a report of an attack where none is reported.

When they win points in the competition, they get to travel away from the citadel to a remote outpost, where Violet reunites with her sister Mira. Xaden and Dain almost come to blows dealing with rules and strategy, with Violet stuck in the middle. Finally, the outpost comes under attack, and they are forced to leave, no matter that Violet wants to fight, but Xaden forces her onto her dragon to fly away.

There are some strange transitions after chapters where big things happen, and this is one of them. We don’t get to see the aftermath, except that Violet sits outside a teacher’s door until she learns that Mira survived.

The final test of the Battle Drill comes in the middle of the night, between sexual acts in Xaden’s bedroom. It was hilarious how Violet tries to keep her journey to the Third-year dorms a secret, to which Xaden replies that everyone knows when they have sex because of all the lightning nearby. They are well-pleasured but not yet sated when the call comes for them to take their assignments. Unknown to her, Dain stole some of her memories, finding out where Xaden disappeared to, which means the children of the rebellion’s leaders are sent to a fortress outside the wards.

The mystery of why the wards keep failing in certain areas is not cleared up in this book, but my question is how the dragons can’t detect people going through them –or maybe they don’t care. They seem to sympathize with Xaden. For the rebellion that his father led turns out to be for a just cause –people are dying outside the wards. While their enemies ride griffons, there is a deeper enemy out there, magic-users who don’t bond with animals, but the land itself. The venin and wyverns attack others indiscriminately, and it’s not clear what they are after, except maybe full domination of magic.

Xaden has been smuggling weapons outside the wards for the griffon riders against the venin. Watching what the venin can do, it’s clear those weapons are not working.

Because Dain stole Violet’s memories, they are sent to die. Dain didn’t expect Xaden to take Violet with him, though, but obeys the rules and lets her go to her death. The griffon and dragon forces are not quite a match for the venin and wyverns. The battle is fun for the most part, but should have been seriously cut down, as many parts didn’t add value to the story. With their waning strength, Liam is killed because of his dragon (opposite to what happens in the Dragonriders of Pern), and the story stops with it. Nobody attacks while they say their teary goodbyes.

Thanks to Andarna, Violet is able to stop time and slay the lead venin, which kills many of the wyvern. It seems like a strange weakness, much like the single battle cruiser controlling the whole droid army in The Phantom Menace, but well within the story’s continuity. Violet is critically injured at the end of the battle, which I assume they’ve won, because everybody stops fighting. For her life, Xaden gives away another of his secrets, that his homeland is being rebuilt, and his people are coming back (how could her government not know this?). Her brother, a master healer who everyone thought was killed in the rebellion (by Xaden’s father), is alive and harboring there, fighting for the rebellion. He manages to save her, but it seems like she’ll never forgive Xaden for hiding secrets (again).

This part bugged me, as she says she gave up all her secrets and is now mad he didn’t do the same. He warned her that he had secrets, and I seriously doubt she gave up all of hers, either. She couldn’t live without him until she learned he was helping their enemies, but that’s not the betrayal she feels –it’s the secrets. But I have no doubt they’ll fall in love again, and break up again, as there are two more books to this series, and they can’t keep up with that kind of passionate sex for that long.

Looking forward to the next book, to continue the story and learn more about how command has hidden the truth from its people.