
Elinor Tregarth is trying to be model poor relation, but her awful cousin and uncle don’t exactly make it easy, and her aunt just closes her eyes and never disagrees with anyone. But when she finally snaps and ends up kidnapping (rescuing, really) her cousin’s pet dragon (all the most fashionable ladies have one this season, don’t you know?), it sets off a chain of events that culminates in her trying to impersonate someone she doesn’t know while helping the man she’s just met and fallen in love with try to marry her cousin.
The author describes this as a rom-com. I’m not sure that’s how I’d describe it. Romantic, definitely, but it’s more a farce than a comedy. Maybe a comedy of errors, with many misunderstandings, double-crossings and blackmail. It was also oddly stressful to read, as I nervously read on to find out what disaster would befall Elinor next!
While I don’t entirely buy the whole idea of love at first sight, the book still sets it up well as Elinor and Benedict start falling for each other, even as Elinor is still desperately trying to set him up with her wealthy cousin. Old tropes, but old for a reason.
I initially thought this was going to be similar to Marie Brennan’s Lady Trent books, with added romance. But although the dragons were initially thought to be natural creatures, magic soon makes an entrance, although it’s fairly subdued.
Burgis says in the note at the end of the book that she’s planning on giving each of Elinor’s sister’s their own book in the series, and my mind immediately went to the idea that there has to be one final book at the end where they all team up to form a giant mecha-dragon to save the world! But leaving aside giant robots, I’ll definitely be looking out for the next in the series to find out how the other Tregarth sisters are coping.