“The curse says you must learn to love and be loved, does it not? Those are the only conditions?”
The dragon nodded, his head still buried in his heads.
The parson broke a piece off a roll and buttered it. “Then I suggest you get a puppy,” he said.

I guess the best way to describe this story would be this: it’s a Beauty and the Beast retelling where the pairing is Beast/Belle’s Dad, except Belle is named Rose, her father is a parson, the Beast is a dragon, there are invisible people instead of singing furniture, and the story takes place in Britain during WWII.

I very much enjoyed the way the story was told, in terms of both the style and the structure. Up to a certain point, the two main characters don’t even seem to have names; they’re referred to simply as the parson and the dragon, and that, along with Gray’s prose, lends the novella a fairy-tale-like or even fable-like quality. It also enhances the feeling of isolation—how separate the two of them are, in this ancient house with its roses, from the real world and the horrors it’s going through. Gradually, though, the style became, bit by bit, a little more grounded as the two worlds grew closer and eventually collided. I can’t pinpoint all the small shifts, but I thought it was beautifully done.
There were a lot of details I enjoyed about this book, too. The zeitgeist strongly present in every scene that wasn’t focused on the dragon and his house. The crippled dog and her every appearance. The parson’s approach to reconciling his orientation and his faith. His relationship with his daughter. And, above all, the overall vibe of kindness that shines through the darkest of times—I really needed that. In a way, the vibe here is a bit similar to The House in the Cerulean Sea, except with more shadows than sunlight (does that even make sense? It makes sense in my head).
The one part about the story I found lacking was the romance itself. It kind of felt… I don’t know, contrived? I do normally enjoy slow burn, and it’s not that I particularly minded seeing these two characters together. I suppose they did have some chemistry, and their story progresses through all the necessary beats. But somehow, I felt that if there was no big kiss at the end and they just stayed friends, or developed some sort of queerplatonic found family relationship, the story would lose nothing at all and perhaps, in some ways, would become even more poignant. I did enjoy their relationship a lot, just… not the romantic aspect of it when it appeared. And to be clear, I’m saying this as a romance reader who bought this book specifically because of the genre.