This is the first book in a new YA series about an indigenous girl and her dragon going to a colonizer dragon school, because her people's dragons all died out and their knowledge of how to work with them is therefore limited. It comes with all the usual rage-inducing micro- and macro-aggressions you'd expect of that setup, but Anequs is a fantastic main character who takes no shit from her schoolmates, teachers, or authority figures. She's quick to question things that don't make sense and will challenge the systems when she struggles with them. She is clever and kind and confident in her identity, and was a very endearing character to follow.
It does read like a first book in a series, and spends a great deal of its pages setting up characters, the setting, and following Anequs through her schooling. My primary complaint was with its choice to use fantasy recreations of existing things; the most egregious example was school subjects that had to be explained in detail via pages of lecture to convey "this is chemistry, but with dragons" and a world map that was described in pages of detail despite being essentially just "Europe and North America". I appreciated that it was a fantasy analogue to our world, which frees it from our own history's course, but I found the explanations tedious when we could've just said "anglereckoning is math". That said, the world and its societies are interesting - I like that our colonizers are Norse-inspired peoples, and I've enjoyed seeing our side characters and Anequs do their cultural exchanges, telling each other stories and explaining important holidays. It added a lot of depth to the characters and societies at play. This book did a lot of work to set up for what I anticipate will be the big confrontations in the next books, and I look forward to seeing how things unfold.
Overall this book was a very enjoyable read, and I think it would appeal to those who liked R.F. Kuang's Babel, though with a more hopeful tone. It releases May 9th.