“I am a dragon hunter,” I told her with great dignity. “We are not woo-woo.”
Much of the plot was a confusing mess. One item, for example – dragon hunters don’t actually hunt dragons, but demons, and they’re called that because they’re actually part demon and part dragon, with the dragon bit keeping the dark-leaning demon side in check. Why or how they’re this way, I don’t know. It didn’t help that the book switched from Ronnie’s first-person POV to Ian’s third person POV frequently. Ronnie has OCD, which I thought was well done for, oh, the first two chapters, and then was promptly forgotten unless it was dragged back out for comic relief or as an example of how Ian’s mere presence “fixed” her. There’s also an annoying running gag about her writing a book about her experiences and whether her creative writing teacher would approve of various chapter titles, dialogue, the believability of various plot points… it just felt like it was trying much too hard to be funny. This is the kind of book that has a wrath demon named Falafel, which sounds delightfully quirky on the surface but just got a bit old when they were trying to have serious conversations about, you know, the fate of the world and all that. It felt, at times, like it was trying very hard to balance between being off the walls quirky and “oh no the world is doomed” and it just didn’t do either well.
“[W]hat’s the good in being a dragon hunter if you can’t cover people in dragon fire and roast them alive?”
While I enjoyed the first few chapters, the book started falling apart once Ronnie met Ian, and the instalust and subsequent instalove really turned me off. I didn’t particularly like or sympathize with either character, and I found their relationship ridiculously unbelievable and unsexy. I forced myself to read the last 25% in the hopes of clearing up the confusing plot points, but while some things became clearer, it didn’t really help the story as a whole. Overall, this was just not my cup of tea at all.
I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.