A grieving survivor. A demanding academy. A secret that could ruin them both.
Claiming a dragon bond was the only way for Kayo to secure a scholarship—and without it, her family faces ruin.
The problem? She doesn’t have one.
Worse, she’s hiding a forbidden drakeling inside the academy’s walls. If it’s discovered, she won’t just be expelled—the academy will make sure neither of them survive.
As instructors push her to prove her worth and rivals look for weaknesses, the academy’s interest turns predatory. Power here isn’t taught—it’s extracted. And the more desperate Kayo becomes, the harder it is to protect the things she cares about most.
To survive, she’ll have to decide how much of herself she’s willing to sacrifice—and whether saving her family is worth the academy’s price.
This prequel novella sets up a new academy series, and overall I liked it, even if it didn’t quite pull me in as deeply as I’d hoped.
I love academy settings, I love dragons, and I love female-led stories that aren’t built around romance, so this was very much in my wheelhouse from the start. The setup has strong bones. A demanding academy, hidden truths, dangerous expectations, and a protagonist trying to survive a system that clearly takes more than it gives. You can feel there is a larger structure behind all of this, something that will likely unfold more fully in the main series.
Where it didn’t fully click for me was in the depth of the character work. I understood Kayo. Her grief, her fear, her desperation all make sense. But I sometimes felt like I was following her from the outside rather than fully sinking into her experience. The emotions are there, but they don’t always linger.
Part of that may be the novella length. Progression has to move quickly, and at times it felt compressed. She struggles and struggles, feels blocked and limited, and then suddenly breaks through in a way that felt a bit too abrupt. The pacing of certain developments, including skill growth, moves fast enough that the transition from “can’t” to “can” doesn’t always feel fully built up. It’s not that it’s illogical, just that I would have liked more time in the in-between.
Compared to my favourite Levi Jacobs books, this one felt a bit thinner in nuance. I tend to love when his characters feel layered and internally tangled, when contradictions, hesitations, and messy internal shifts are given more room to breathe. Here, some of that depth felt reduced.
That said, I was never bored. It’s quick, engaging, and easy to move through. And as a foundation for a series, it absolutely works. The academy concept intrigues me, the dragon element is exactly my kind of thing, and I’m very curious to see how this world and these characters deepen over a full-length novel. If this is just the starting line, I’m definitely ready to see where the race goes next.
