Hello everyone!
I apologise in advance if there will be typing errors in this post. A little bit earlier I managed to nick a finger and, as you all well know, fingers tend to bleed like you lost at least an inch of them even though it's just a teeny, tiny scratch! So I had to improvise a bit with a bandage as a normal one just didn't cut it, ergo ending with some sort of stump on top of said finger which makes typing ... difficult.
But anyway.
I did in fact finish quite a few books in the last couple of days, and any one of them would have probably been quite a good cut for this week's blog post, but I need to cool off from one of them (I'm looking at you, Warden) so I decided to go for a lighter reading material today.
Turns out, I'm a Beauty and the Beast nut for certain.
Lo and behold, I found yet another retelling of the story, although truth be told the more I look at this, the more it sounds like it might be a combination of a lot of things, not just one particular fairytale or even legend, actually.
In any event, however, I fell in love with the author's writing style and the pretty much non-drama issues in the book, a realistic approach to the main heroine, and so, without further ado, allow me to present Dragon Rose.
I'd never before read a book by Christine Pope, but this one came free for my Kobo e-reader and, since I was once again forced to do a factory reset, I figured it might just be easier to tackle the 200+ books I still had on the Kobo server as opposed to trying to load everything from my computer.
Yeah, I know, I have issues.
Anyway, I forgot I even had the book in the first place when an email last night from Bookbub (which is an incredibly handy thing to be subscribed to, by the way, shameless advertising here) reminded me that I should probably read it.
Then I went and devoured it in a couple of hours.
The main story is this: the town of Lirinsholme has been under the shadow of the Black Keep, and the Dragon within it, for more than five hundred years. Every once in a while, a red b anner will fly from the castle, indicating the villagers must send a maiden, between sixteen to twenty years old, to be the Dragon's new bride. All contact with the girl is then lost, until the process begins anew, and this has been going on for much longer than the characters who we meet in this story have been alive.
But I digress. Our story actually begins with Rhianne, who is just shy of twenty years and doesn't want to settle for a man her father's age for a husband. Instead, she wants to become a painter, but since that is a male-dominated profession, she'd have better hopes in learning how to fly.
Especially after it's discovered that SHE, not her ailing father, is actually putting in effort (and skill) in the family's pottery business, making the townspeople reject perfectly good pottery because, GASP, it was made by a GIRL.
You know, we have cooties.
Anyway.
It's around this time, when Rhianne's best friend is getting ready for her own marriage, that the banner flies above the castle, and it's the bride-to-be that gets chosen for the Dragon's newest wife.
Rhianne isn't having it - in her opinion, the solution is perfect: she will go in her stead, and thus disappear from the town which is now so against her, giving her family a thousand gold as bride price paid by her husband.
All well said and done, but she does get nervous once she arrives to the actual Keep.
This is where she's prepared for the wedding, in a set of lavish chambers for her own personal use, and where she learns that, no, the Dragon isn't going to eat her.
Instead of an actual dragon beast, however, she meets her husband-to-be who is simply a hooded-and-cloaked man, by the name of Theran (I THINK I got his name right ... more often than not he's just referred to as the Dragon or the Dragon lord, honestly) who she detects has to have something wrong with his face because his lips feel odd when he kisses her.
But, since he has no plans to actually eat her, she's okay with that. Also, no plans to bed her, either, which is MORE than okay for Rhianne!
The two of them start a bonding process tha looks a lot like a game of chess to an outside viewer, or basically, one step forward, two steps back. Rhianne tries to be sensible and open-minded, not hiding from him but also curious about what happened to his previous brides, what, exactly, is the curse he's under, and is he really a dragon.
This last one gets answered pretty definitely and super fast when she pisses him off and sends him into the night as a 747-sized flying creature that spouts flames and makes Paolini's Shruikan feel like a tame pet.
Through many stops and starts, Rhianne slowly begins to learn more about the Dragon lord - besides the fact that he IS really a dragon, that he's a cultured, intelligent individual who tinkers as a hobby, doesn't sleep (thank you, curse) and seems to yearn to be closer to her, but also always pulls back before anything can happen.
Meanwhile, she's busy painting, as he had gotten her all the supplies she might need, and she keeps dreaming of this man she's never met in her life, finally giving up and starting a portrait of him. Throughout the book, she keeps working on it, even as she tries to get closer to her Dragon.
But she's really no closer to discovering anything about the curse, other than that her husband never laid a finger on the girls he married, yet somehow they still ended up in the cemetery in the woods.
Going on a little exploration, Rhianne finds a set of old chambers which had been used for one of the brides, and mysterious writing about everything going black.
Kind of like she herself felt for a while there, lethargic and completely loose, sleeping through most of her days and nights, until she managed to drag herself back into the land of the living again. She doesn't, however, make the connection at once.
Only when, in desperation because her husband won't let her close, she returns to the fated chambers and finds more diary entries from one of the past brides, describing how she will kill herself to be free of 'him', does Rhianne want to follow, as well, going so far as to throwing herself from the tower window, but luckily the Dragon catches her. Unluckily, she's not done, and rages at him to let her go since he doesn't need her, and she goes to try and finish the job, leading the two of them back to her own chambers.
Where he sees the finished portrait of the man from her dreams.
After which, TA-DA: the curse is broken! And as he lifts the hood of his cloak, Rhianne sees him for the first time, in real life - the man from her dreams.
He then explains that, long ago, he tangled with the daughter of a mage, but didn't wish to wed her as he had a duty to his family, so she killed herself instead, enraging her father who placed a curse on the Lord of Black Keep: never to know the joy of matrimony as his handsome looks were stripped away, and his bride would always be fated to fall under the curse and kill herself in some way. If he tried to hold off another marriage, disaster would strike the town he was responsible for, and if he tried to stop the bride from killing herself, his own servants would perish. This would last until there came one who could see him for who he truly was, beyond the curse.
Finally, Rhianne gets what she always wanted after realizing she'd fallen in love with her husband: her husband in reality, her family back as the castle is now open once again with the lifted curse, and a life of adventure ahead of her.
The end!
It was an interesting, not too complicated story which filled up a few hours of my day, and which I quite enjoyed, actually. It seems to be a combination of Beauty and the Beast, lore about dragons (maiden sacrifices to keep them happy) and, don't be mad, but the no sleep thing reminds me of Twilight.
Still, there were some things I would have really enjoyed more: we never got to see the Dragon lord under his hood, which makes it a bit redundant as, apart from that one kiss at the wedding, we don't really know, as readers, why he's repulsive. It would have been interesting to see a reveal BEFORE he got back to his own skin. Also, a bit more fleshing out of the curse and some more hints would have made the suspense more believable, connecting the fact that it was actually the BRIDES, and not the man, who suffered under this black cloud until their deaths. And I felt the ending was a bit rushed, perhaps another chapter would have been good to just cinch a few things.
But, overall, an enjoyable read, and I'm looking forward to getting my hand on the rest of the series!
xx
*image not mine
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