*All the spoilers*
This book was a fun, easy read, though I think it needed one more go by an editor. It contradicted itself a few times, or at least it really confused me a few times.
Example 1: When she shifts to human for the first time in the story, the book implies she’s never been human before or touched a sword before:
“He smiled at the consternation on her face. ‘It takes a moment to adjust to being on two legs when you’re used to four.’ Lying flat on her back, she let out an exasperated breath. ‘Two legs are just not steady. What a stupid evolutionary thing. No wonder humans are only good for food or torching. I hate this!’” … “'I know what the sword is for.' She’d seen enough of them used on her brethren, and had been stabbed too many times herself by overzealous morons. Damn them all. The last thing she wanted was to ever touch one.”
Then later during a fight in which she uses the sword, we learn she has extensive experience fighting on two legs:
“But someone else had trained her for war. This wasn’t just a result of the powers he’d given her when he made her human. She knew how to fight in a human body as if she’d spent time doing so. Aye, she had been trained in this form and had a lot of experience. She instinctively knew how to protect her battle partner.” We also learn that at one point she was a kid playing in the street after being kidnapped and sold. It doesn’t say what manner of kid, but the “kids playing in the street” that she references were in a human town. Then even later, that her kidnapper had changed her between dragon and human on the reg and that she'd "spent months with ogres who'd helped her learn sword-craft." Whut.
Example 2: Back to the fighting experience, Dash gives her “the ability to defend herself with the strength of a male” which sounds stupid, but is that why she’s good at protecting her battle partner? So she doesn’t have extensive experience, just was downloaded with Defense™?
Example 3: Dash can give people abilities? What???
Example 4: The dragon court and her family are described as “out to build their reputations by tearing hers down,” “backbiting,” “jealous and out to rip her to shreds,” “opponents,” petty and greedy, plotting, wrathful, vicious. Her family wanted to banish her for being kidnapped. Her sisters kill their brother and father.
Later we learn this: “While [unicorns] and humans often thought of dragons as mindless animals, dragons were no such thing. They were a peaceful race who preferred to live in herds, in their own mountainous kingdom, far away from everyone else.” Okay so only the courtiers and royals are abominable?
Other things that bothered me:
1. Tania has elfish beauty and pointed ears but she’s human.
2. Dash and Tania are attracted to each other’s human forms right away. For Dash it makes sense because the unicorns naturally shift between creature and human, but it seems like Tania was only around humans when she was kidnapped, and she said that humans are only good for food or killing in the beginning of the book.
3. Tania’s beautiful because she’s…naive? (“The magick that allowed them to shape-shift didn’t naturally make someone beautiful. Like a unicorn horn, it echoed what was on the inside. An ugly soul manifested as a hideous beast. No one could hide their true nature from his spell. So, for the dragon to be so fair... She was as naive inside as his sister had been.”)
4. Do shifted forms of people spelled by Dash get uglier or more beautiful as the quality of the soul changes?