I do not enjoy young adult novels. This is very much a young adult novel. It claims to be general content, but it is a beat by beat young adult Hunger Games type novel, with maybe a bit more gore.
Plot: There’s a ruthless society and they send everyone to a school where people get placed in different colleges. This time, it’s classic high school rules – the jocks go to fight, the nerds go to the library, and we don’t really care about anyone else. Our hero is a girl who wanted to be a nerd but was forced to be a jock because of her jock mom. There’s also the best guy friend who is secretly in love with her and, as is mandatory, a brooding bad boy with a heart of gold. Who will she pick?! There are also dragons. Shenanigans ensue.
If you want an Attack-on-Titan-How-to-Train-Your-Dragon-Hunger-games love child, this is it. You will get extra gore, but this is not a romantasy, it’s anime-style romance – so expect a lot of internal monologuing, self sabotage, and longing glances.
The heroine is interesting in that she has severe chronic health issues which had kept her mostly housebound during her life (and the reason she wanted to get places in the library). Her mom forces her into the jock stream that a lot of fully able bodied people die in – even on day 1. And you’d think the disability would be treated as, well, disabling, but it doesn’t. The heroine is very smart and knowledgeable, which allows her to find alternate routes to the same solution. She is also, because of her bad health, extremely resilient. She’s injured often and badly and she just pushes through, because that’s what she’s always done. And after grueling training, she actually finds that she was stronger than she realized, and that she could do more than anyone gave her credit for. She was not cured, but she made peace with her body, which feels all the more special.
She is in other ways, like every other Super Special but actually painfully inobservant (despite observation being one of her key strengths) Chosen One Girl.
That thread in the story is the only thing that got me to finish the book. It won’t be enough to get me to pick up Part 2 because literally every other plot point is predictable to the point of causing my physical pain. And I am not resilient enough to endure it.
Side note – I listened to the Dramatized Adaptation, a very fancy new audiobook experience which is very cool. Just don’t linger overlong on the fear that this will become the expectation and the number of audiobooks that get made is reduced a thousand fold because that’s how much more work this type of audiobook is (and also if you don’t have a copy at the library like me you’re being asked to put up $150 for it) the way the normal for movies became $150-250M.