This book was not only excellent, it was also, unexpectedly, cozy.
The premise here (dispensing with made-up names of the fantasy veneer) is that Anequs, a Native American girl in early-to-mid 19th century New England, has found a dragon egg. Her people had lost their dragons, and the knowledge of how to train them, with the population crash brought about by European epidemics a couple hundred years before the book began. Since then her people have been living quietly on their island, largely left to their own devices because they are no threat and have nothing the colonizers want. The surviving natives on another nearby island are a major background presence: they had been in a similar situation, but that changed when coal was discovered on their island. Suddenly the colonizers wanted it very much indeed.
So Anequs has a dragon, and while this is hugely celebrated, there’s also a few problems. For one, she doesn’t know how to train her dragon to control its insanely dangerous breath. For another, the colonizers have strict rules for the keeping and training of dragons; if they find out that Anequs’ people had a dragon and were concealing it, the consequences would probably be extreme. So Anequs contacts a reputable dragon training school and enrolls.
The problems she faces are, largely, predictable. She is totally unfamiliar with the colonzers’ culture, and finds their social rules both stifling and baffling. The students, and dragoneers in general, are almost entirely male, with all that goes along with that. She hasn’t had the education and training that her classmates have had, since most of them come from the gentry. Some of her teachers do not respect her, and a large and powerful faction (both within the school and within colonizer society at large) don’t think she should be allowed a dragon at all. She knows she must excel academically if she is to succeed, and must not appear to be any kind of a threat, but at the same time she is proud of her people and their culture and unwilling to assimilate more than necessary.
But “predictable” does not mean “bad.” Anequs through it all maintains a solid sense of self, and that carries the story wonderfully. She makes a core group of friends, including potential romantic interests. She has her attackers, she has her defenders as well. I kept expecting things to go very wrong - her dragon killed, her friends killed, her village destroyed, something on that spectrum. It’s not all sunshine and roses, but it’s also not dark in the way I was expecting. Like I said at the top, it was, surprisingly, cozy.
One last point: the big thing that she needs to learn how to control is her dragon’s breath. Dragonbreath can, essentially, do magic chemistry. Everything is given different names, but a dragon can (for a very basic example) break down water into gaseous hydrogen and oxygen. I myself got my degree in chemistry, and those parts of the book were a delightful diversion as I tried to follow everything. Blackgoose did her homework.
Strong debut, and I’m excited to see what she comes out with in the future.