Dragonbirth by Raina Nightingale is the fourth and final book from my Second Batch of books that I’m aiming to read and review this month which will be followed by my update post on Monday.  I have seven books remaining and will post my third batch of books during the forthcoming week.  My reviews so far are linked below and you can find feedback from my first batch of books here and further information on SPFBO here.

As the title suggests, this is a book of dragons.  A young village girl, Silmavalien, finds what she thinks is an unusual stone that eventually hatches into a dragon that bonds with her.  In a world where dragons are thought of as demons the birth of this dragon must be kept secret and the obvious and only course for Silmavalien seems to be to leave her village and family behind and go into hiding with her new companion.

Essentially this book is about Silmavlien’s journey with her dragon and her struggles to keep them both alive along the way.

This one reads almost like a journal with a lot of focus on the everyday essentials of survival whilst keeping a young dragon with a large appetite alive.  To be honest, in some respects there is such a lot of attention paid to these everyday tasks that it makes it difficult to form any real attachments to either the dragon or the young girl and in fact the plot feels a little thin with a lot of repetition.

To be fair to the author she mentions in her foreword that she wrote this story when she was in her early teens and in that respect this is an achievement but, for me, it feels unpolished in its current form and not a book that I would really recommend.

I do love dragons and so I really wanted to love this one but it didn’t quite work out for me.

My thanks to the author for providing a copy.  The above is my own opinion.

Books already reviewed for SPFBO :

1. Deathborn by CE Page
2. Graves Robbed, Heirlooms Returned by Ashley Capes
3. Stranded by Rosalind Tate
4. One of Us by ML Roberts
5. Berserker by Dimitrios Gkirgkiris
6. Stone Magus by Stephanie C Marks
7. Book of Secrets by Claudia Blood