Queer dragon rider fantasy with an m/m romance, betrayal, and two disabled protagonists.
Tauran Darrica has been retired from the Valreus Sky Guard for four years following the Battle of the Broken Wings that resulted in the death of his dragon. Now, all Tauran wants to do is spend his days forgetting the past and gambling his way to an unsteady income.
So when his old general from the Sky Guard hunts Tauran down to request his help with staving off the increasingly aggressive wild dragon population, Tauran refuses. But a fire ruins his rented room and leaves him without a place to stay, and Tauran finds himself on the road to Valreus, after all.
Tauran is determined to stay as far away from dragons as he can get, but a starry-eyed young man from Sharoani, land of the wild dragons, might just ruin his plans.
Kalai Ro-Ani has spent his life watching the stars, knowing he could never reach them.
With his wild dragon Arrow, he sets out for the city of Valreus in the hope of building himself a better future than he could have stuck at the foot of the Kel Visal dragon temples.
But nobody told Kalai that only the Sky Guard is allowed to own dragons, so when Arrow kills a guard in Kalai’s defense, it looks like his adventure might be over before it can begin. But a chance encounter at the old Valreus archive offers Kalai the future he’d been hoping for. In the span of a single day, he has a home, a job, and a purpose.
In Valreus, something much bigger falls into his lap – along with a tall and striking Valrean man with a rather strange disposition.
“A new, LGBT+ fantasy story from Zaya Feli, featuring dragons, aerial battles and epic journeys through dangerous wilderness.”
I recevied an ARC and reviewed honestly and voluntarily.
Content warnings include: violence, animal abuse, disability (fainting episodes, consequences of badly broken leg), substance addiction, sex on-page, character seeks out sex worker, giving someone harmful medication under false pretenses, military being absolute authority vibes, trauma.
Mentions of: animal death, suicide attempt, falling from sky, execution, threat of executing a child, homelessness, arson.
As soon as I read dragons and saw the beautiful cover, I was hooked.
I found the book very engaging. I admittedly struggled with the beginning, and I was wary of its length (a whopping 764 pages!) but I ended up reading a big chunk of it in one sitting, staying up until deep into the night because I couldn’t put it down.
Kalai and Tauran were good protagonists, though I admit I was more fascinated by the side characters. A lot of them were queer, and there thankfully was no queerphobia. Kalai is gay and Tauran is bisexual, and there’s an important secondary character who is trans.
I also liked that the book was sex positive – one of the characters seeks out a sex worker at some point, and it’s a positive experience and no-one is shamed for it (it happens before the main romance and the two protagonists actually talk about it at some point without bad feelings.)
I also liked that both character were disabled. Tauran has a bad leg from when he broke it, and Kalai just faints out of nowhere sometimes. Addiction is also a topic and handled rather well, and while there were positive mentions in regards to therapy and trauma, I felt a bit meh about the negative role medication played in the story. Taking medication was not portrayed as something bad in itself, but it was weaponized by the antagonist.
The true stars of the book for me were the dragons though! They were great! Though here, too, I wish there had been more in depth info about them – for a long time I wasn’t sure if they were sentient or not.
The writing was rather simple, and I think I unfortunately didn’t quite mesh with the author’s style. It was easy and fast to read, and I could always follow what was going on, but the way it told the story just wasn’t for me.
There were several instances that seemed like huge plotholes to me – they weren’t in the end, and it was all explained later on, but the fact that when they were first brought up it wasn’t acknowledged at all that it didn’t make sense felt off to me and threw me out of the reading flow.
The POV switches between the two protagonists tended to be confusing timeline wise, were sometimes time passed in one POV but not the other, and this wasn’t helped by the book’s pacing overall feeling off to me. Several times events were portrayed as super urgent, but then it took forever and various detours to actually get there, or things that seemed important were pushed aside without mention.
I also found the worldbuilding a bit lacking. There wasn’t much depth to the different countries and cultures, and I had so many questions that weren’t addressed at all. I guess a lot of details weren’t relevant to the story because they never came up, but I still don’t know how much authority the Sky Guard actually had, and who rules or governs the countries – there doesn’t seem to be a ruler, but then how is it a country when there doesn’t seem to be a unifying aspect that sets them apart? Overall it had more city state vibes to me.
Speaking of Sky Guard and authority, I wish this hadn’t been yet another story where dragon riders are a military institution. Ultimately this was adressed in the plot, however, so it wasn’t as bad as I feared. Still, I think I would have preferred a story about the Sharoani Dragon Masters. They sounded so cool, and I wanted more information about them!
Ultimately, Wild Sky is an entertaining fantasy adventure with dragons and a queer cast. The story was solid, with different aspects driving the tension. Fantasy lovers won’t find anything new here, but it was engaging and fun to read.
Check the book out on Goodreads and buy it here. It is available via Kindle Unlimited.
~iam
MI Book Reviews 