My latest read is a book that caught me by surprise with the first sentence. Because, quite unusually, it’s told from the PoV of a dragon.

In a world where dragons are enslaved, the first-person PoV of a dragon promised an interesting story. Bayloo – that’s how the humans call this dragon – managed to free his mind from the stranglehold of mysterious runic magic. But, given how thorough the human handlers are, he knows from the start that being truly free will be a difficult task.

Bayloo – once a slave mindlessly obeying commands – makes mistakes in his first acts as a partially-free dragon, which makes him humanely relatable. That mistake has quite dire consequences, and starts a chain of events that shows Bayloo that the struggle for his freedom may be a long one, and that he may need to take difficult bargains.

To make things worse, he’s given a new rider – one with mind so strong that he can impose his will against him even with the bond not functioning completely. And they together discover something potentially dangerous for the whole world, which pushes Bayloo to some hard questions about his freedom and role in the world.

And when the final battle comes, Bayloo will face quite a couple of hard questions – and need to decide how much he’s willing to do for his freedom – or the freedom of other dragons. During the sequence, the book raises quite a several questions that set up the plot of the next book.

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Read date: 19.-27.3.2023
Published: 19.5.2021
Goodreads/Amazon rating: 4,31/4,4
My rating: 85%
Length: 254 pages (Kindle Edition)
My highlights

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What adds a lot of lightheartedness are Bayloo’s comments – a dragon’s view of things is quite different than a human’s and gives it a specific kind of humorous element. Aside from that, the book is quite a short read.