If you tell people you are making a project of reading books about dragons you WILL be asked if you've read Fourth Wing. There are evidently a lot of people who either love or hate this work. I found myself a bit indifferent about it. But, let's face it, at sixty years of age I'm not exactly its target audience. This is a book for "new adults" and features a group of twenty-somethings at a magical war college (Basgiath) learning how to fly dragons. The classes are deadly. Many die before they even get to their first class. Violet Sorrengail never even wanted to join the elite team of dragon riders. She wanted to be a scribe and train to be a librarian in Basgiath's archives, like her father. Her mother, however, insisted that she risk her life in the Rider's Quadrant.
Of course, her time studying to be a scribe only makes her more bad-ass, even though she is among the weakest and smallest members of the Rider's Quadrant. She knows not only the value of information, but also where to find it, how to use it to her own advantage, and to understand who gains from telling the stories.
Violet is also discovers that forbidden information is perhaps the most powerful information of all.
No one believes Max when he tells them there is a dragon eating all the books in the library - not his mother, not his father, not the head librarian, not his teacher. Only Officer Riley suggests that they go and look, but by then it is too late.
Of particular note is that the head librarian is a man. Because of course the head librarian is a man. Leadership positions in libraries always go to men. We can't really expect otherwise though. It's just so hard to find women in the field.😏
One of the sixty books about dragons I'm reading this year of the dragon, in which I turn 60.
