Today I have the great pleasure of reviewing The Dragon of Ynys by Minerva Cerridwen as part of her release tour. It's a sweet fantasy novella about diversity in fiction.
I was given an eARC in exchange for an honest review.
I didn't know what to expect from this book. All I really knew about it was there's a dragon and Miranda Cerridwn wrote it, but that was enough for me because she's a terrific writer.
The story starts off in a small town besieged by a snarky dragon with an affinity for shiny things, and asexual/aromantic knight Sir Violet develops a working relationship with him when he goes to retrieve the objects from Snap's cave. Their banter is great.
I was delighted when a woman from the village enlisted Snap and Violet to find her missing wife, and even moreso when I thought "Oh, so it's a detective story?" and the book went "Nope!" and twisted into a quest for *spoopy handwaving so I don't spoil it*
This story is the sweetest, most pure thing. And so darn queer and accepting, it almost hurts. It's like, "You're a man who wears a dress? What are your pronouns? He/him? Okie dokie!" (Except for one character at the beginning who is pretty transmisic, but she is clearly not a good guy.)
This book has such an easy style of prose. No long, boring descriptions of countryside that so many fantasy books seem hung up on. It feels like a fairy tale - no word is wasted and every bit of dialogue has a purpose. And every name is a kind of plant! And there's a spider with a lisp but the book avoids that annoying thing where lithpth are thpelled out phonetically. It just goes "the spider had a lisp" and that's that.
You need this book in your life, your children need this book, the world needs this book.
Visit Minerva's site for buy links: https://minervacerridwen.wordpress.com/2018/05/16/release-day/
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