Society is kept in line through hierarchies of royal court and church. The setting is reminiscent of Renaissance Europe, and Hartman does an impressive job walking the line between familiar and strange: alongside the dragons, slash-sleeved courtiers wander the streets, and the sound of shawms and sackbuts float out over the town. They also seem a bit like stereotypical grad students with bad beards and no fashion sense. In Vancouver writer Rachel Hartman’s debut young adult novel, we meet shape-shifting dragons that can almost pass for human, though in that form they have no real understanding of emotion and don’t get the point of art. What’s the deal with dragons? Mythical creatures abound, but dragons seem to be the Rorschach blots of contemporary fantasy, embodying – with their scales, hoarded treasure, and breath of fire – all our anxieties and obsessions.
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