Rating: ★★★ | 11 hours 27 minutes | Self-Published | Sci-Fi Romance | 06/20/2017
Seven years ago, after dragons appeared in the sky, America reformed itself into heavily militarized compounds dotting a scorched wasteland. That’s right, it’s a good old-fashioned dragon apocalypse, ya’ll.
When 25-year-old Claudia Jones gets caught illegally scavenging by the local militia, they decide to use her as dragon bait and leave her in the wastelands with instructions to figure out, um….how tame a dragon. Claudia has no idea what that even means until she catches the attention of a golden dragon and learns that the dragons are shifters and this one is a man…a man who very much wants her as his mate.
I wanted to like this book but, I’m just not into how base Dixon’s heroes tend to be. I was hoping since the dragons were shifters they would be more emotionally complex than Dixon’s infamous blue barbarians but the dragon shifter hero, Kael, is borderline troglodytic. He can’t remember what happened before he came to Earth so literally all he thinks about is getting and keeping his mate. I just need a little more emotional intelligence and complexities in a hero’s story. Claudia was a great heroine though, she gets thrown into a bonkers situation and through it all was resourceful, tough as nails and fiercely loyal to her friends and family.
Claudia’s narrator, Noelle Bridges, originally drew me to this book, she has this slightly raspy voice that works for a character who has been through an apocalypse and she’s got a vast array of male voices. Jeremy York, on the other hand, sounded like a straight-up creeper to me. I don’t know how to explain it. He doesn’t narrate a lot of sections but it was annoying enough that I ended up finishing this book in print.
This book does follow a lot of the same beats of Dixon’s blue barbarians. I wouldn’t recommend this series to everyone, but if you fell for Dixon’s blue barbarians but want denser storytelling and higher stakes this might be for you.
I always thought when Ruby Dixon said she was NYT Best Selling author she meant as Ruby Dixon but apparently Ruby Dixon is the under wraps pen name of an established NYT best selling author. All this to say is my guess is that Ruby Dixon is Kristen Ashley because of the alpha heroes and I think she knows the self-pub game well enough to get covers like these designed.