reading-gremlin

[reading-gremlin]

Dragons et mécanismes

Let’s start with one that I don’t think has an english translation. It is a YA novel written by Adrien Tomas and is somewhere between steampunk and fantasy, if the title had not made that obvious already. We follow Dague a young thief and informant as he accompanies Mira —a foreign noble— as her bodyguard. It is technically the second book in its series but considering the setting and cast are almost completely different from the first one it can easily be read as a standalone and with no knowledge whatsoever of the first one. Trust me, that’s what I did.

Without spoiling too much, it has a lot of political scheming, adventures in the jungle, an amazing worldbuilding and some horror elements as well.

The cast

The cast is mostly made of black/POC characters, with only Mira, her pursuers and a group of secondary characters being white. Mira is not confirmed but heavily implied to be neurodivergent, maybe autistic. As for Dague, he uses a prosthetic arm for most of the journey and is also pansexual. Shumbi, a warrior who joins the group later on, is genderfluid. There are multiple villains with different goals and personalities and they are all great. There are many more but none that either I can speak about without spoiling or are really plot relevant.

What I liked about the book

I liked how Shumbi’s gender played out with their people’s ability — sidenote, Shumbi uses she/her or he/him pronouns depending on the gender they feel the most aligned to at any given moment but since I could not bring myself to pick one or another, I’m using they/them but let me know if I should do otherwise— this ability lets these people change their bodies to their liking. Socially, they are allowed to keep changing during childhood but must pick one into adulthood/their teenage years. Shumbi keeps on changing despite being already at what their people considers adult age and I found that to be a fun way of somewhat dodging the shapeshifting non-binary trope or rather using it in a creative way.

The dragons and their lore is so fascinating and entertaining, it’s just a lot of fun. It leads to a mix of biological and anthropological studies. Plus, come on, these are dragons!

Not just for the dragons, mind you. As I said earlier, the worldbuilding here is great, especially for a YA book.

The villains are genuinely terrifying and creepy but in different ways.

As always, when picking up the book, I was dreading the overdone “Main boy and main girl end up together at the end despite it not being a romance book” trope but I was pleasantly surprised when they ended up as not just friends but best friends!

The magic system is really neat too! With different techniques from different parts of the world or simply different people in the same country.

Some other stuff I cannot ramble about without stepping into spoiler territory but trust me when I say I could gush about this book for ages.

All in all

A great book whether you like stories about dragons, political machinations or simply mystery. With a rather diverse cast of interesting characters it definitely feels like a breath of fresh air from yet another cast of cishet able-bodied white people. At least, it did for me. Maybe try it if you want/can.

[reading-gremlin]

BEFORE ANYTHING I feel like I should preface this blog by saying that some of the books I’ll talk about on there might not have been translated in English or at least not to my knowledge. However I will try my best to give the English title when it exists to help finding the book.