This book was so much freaking fun.
It’s got so much cool shit in it. Airships. Jungles infested with fantasy dinosaurs. Found family. Heists. Love triangles that don’t make me want to smack everyone involved. Terrible puns. Wonderful puns. (Often the same pun.) Dragons. More dragons. And check out this cover! Seriously, that is such a cool cover.
This is set in a world split in two. On the one hand, you have the Skylands, mountain top cities linked by airships. On the other hand, you have the jungles of the Deeps. The humans of the Skylands are ruled by dragons, whose leadership sits somewhere between tyrannical and disinterested neglect. The Skylanders see the people of the Deeps as primitive savages, though of course it’s not so simple.
Our main character is Anahrod, cast out of the Skylands and into the Deeps for a crime she did not commit. Literally cast out: she was tossed off an airship 50,000 feet up. But she was able to survive and start a life in the Deeps with her titan drake (basically a fantasy dinosaur) Overbite. Anahrod finds herself between a rock and a very large, scaled, be-toothed, breath-weapon-wielding place when she is hunted both by the self-proclaimed king of the Deeps (also her ex-boyfriend) and a dragon, dragonrider, and miscellaneous companions searching for her on the rumor that she somehow survived her fall. That group wants her for something they keep quiet about, but they also aren’t trying to kidnap or kill her (and Ris the dragonrider is distractingly sexy) so it’s not really a hard choice for Anahrod which group to go with.
From there we’re off. This is, as I said at the top, a hell of a lot of fun. Pure popcorn fiction in the very best sense of the term. Highly recommended.
Comments