Review: Dragonfall

Dragonfall by L.R. Lam
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

L.R. Lam's long awaited return to the fantasy genre gives a lot of similar vibes to their debut trilogy with Micah Grey, but also a lot more of the epic fantasy influence of one of their favorite authors, Robin Hobb, to whom this book is dedicated. There's also a fair amount of N.K. Jemisin influence with the wide variety of POV styles: Arcady gets a first person POV, Everen gets second person (with "you" in this instance being addressed to Arcady), and several other characters with maybe one or two POV chapters each, all in third person. Some of these characters - namely Sorin, as well as Arcady themself - also give lots of V.E. Schwab vibes, being quite reminiscent in various ways of Schwab's genderfluid thief fan fave Lila Bard. Fittingly for a book from Lam, this one also boasts as gender diverse a cast as they've ever written, with sign language indicators of pronouns which characters give after introducing their names. Not unlike the real world, though, it's not as widely accepted elsewhere in universe - at least one other nation in this book is spoken of quite negatively because of its extremely conservative and unaccepting attitude towards LGBTQ+ people. For me, though, this book's main selling points were how it took a couple of stylistic devices of which I'm not particularly fond - second person POV from Everen, and the enemies to lovers dynamic of Everen and Arcady - and made me appreciate them. Everen, in particular, is one of my favorite characters Lam has ever created (perhaps second only to Micah Grey, with Dax a close third and Taema fourth). And as for that ship, well, it works extremely well as a slow burn. Hopefully it's not too long a wait until Lam gets the second book published, because that burn needs to pick up the pace on its fuse, if you know what I mean...

View all my reviews