What can I say? I love Brownies, I love Danny and I love everything to do with dragons. Oh and I love Lily and Rule. A lot happens in this story and I am amazed at how entertaining this series still is. ( )

Another winner in the Lupi series. I loved this one. The thing I like most about these books is the unexpected directions the author takes with the plot. So far, the books haven’t become formulaic or stale, and I really enjoy Wilks’s imaginative turns. The dragon-heavy elements this time around made it all the better. Bring on the dragons—I can’t get enough of them.
I liked having equal time with Rule’s and Lily’s POVs in this book, and Demi’s involvement in the plot ended up being extremely heartwarming. ( )

Ok, so this series is starting to get to the so complicated I can't remember what happened in the last book stage, which is sad. However! If you stick with it, as I did, you are rewarded by both dragons and brownies, in addition to government conspiracies, interesting magical worlds, superpowers and fast paced action, so yeah, that's cool. Also, I love living in a time where one of the main characters has aspergers, gender fluidity is a thing and there's a serious discussion on pronouns from the fey. Yah, diversity, I like you in my media. ( )

74 points/100 (3.75 stars/5).

In a book of many happenings, Lily goes off on a dragon mission without Rule and gets kidnapped, Rule and Ruben get arrested, and there is a mysterious government official sowing chaos.

I thought over this for a few hours, and I really just don't think I liked this book overmuch. I found most of the plot points eye rolling-ly stupid. Also, despite such huge (and dumb) decision makings in this book, I really don't believe there are going to be any consequences at all in the rest of the series. There certainly wasn't at the end of this book.

Overall, this half feels like a throwaway book, a side novel, something not to worry about. This book will have consequences for the rest of the series, but I worry for some of the implications. This series already has one bad guy they are devoting all their attentions to. Now, we have another bad guy they are going to be devoting their attentions to while still looking out for the first. I just do not like those implications. At some point a series has to end, and I'd rather the series end on a high instead of dragging on until no one can stand to read it anymore.

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Lily’s bond with Rule is as stretched and confused as it’s ever been – thanks to the lessons she is having in Mind Speech. This is the worst time for her to disappear when she cannot be found

But Lily vanishes following up on a favour she cannot deny – while at the same time a conspiracy strikes against the Shadow Unit. The whole apparatus designed to fight The Enemy, Ruben the head of the unit, Rule the head of two Lupi clans are all targeted in a devastating co-ordinated attack.

It’s the worst time for Lily to be out of touch as everything they’ve built begins to crumble.

Back to Lily as a protagonist! I always love this focus, because Lily Yu is an awesome protagonist and one of my favourites

And, of course, I love the world building. I love the massively creative world building. I love that such a lot of originality has gone into not only designing the world with this crash of magic into the technological world, the various magical societies from the Brownies to the Lupi who all have their own cultures and magic and language all really well done together. And then we have the dragons with their completely unique biology coupled with their own culture and traditions and opinions and beliefs. It’s excellent. It’s really original and well developed and nuanced.

And I love Lily. I do love lily. I love that she’s so sensible. I love that even when worried and angry and outraged and upset and emotional she’s still logical and capable and empathetic enough to see from a different point of view. I love how she can be angry with various supernatural beings while also acknowledging that from their point of view they’re a very different beings with vastly different values. She can acknowledge that, understand that, respect that – but not by being a complete door mat to them. The fact they have a dramatically different culture doesn’t mean they’re allowed to treat her in ways that she finds unacceptable because of it.

I also like how, when discussing the history of magic on this world we’re not assuming a global constant and acknowledging that just because something happened in the west didn’t mean it happened the same everywhere

Lily’s awesome. The world is awesome.

And I really like Demi; she’s a character with Aspergers who appears to have been well represented because of it. Her need for patterns and social difficulties along with her thought patterns seem very well presented while at no point being used to make her either this alien super hero (too often autism is created a some kind of weird origin story for some kind of mental super power). Her courage, drive, knowledge, determination, moral compass and navigating around the lupi and more powerful magical beings around her.

I also quite like the concept of the sinister government org – or some sinister human org. I mean we have repeatedly see various supernatural threats menacing humanity – but magic suddenly becomes real, there are plenty of bad people and bad organisations who are going to exploit that. Part of Lily’s worry about joining the Shadow Unit was her fear over what a unit like this could do with so little oversight. So common human greed and corruption needed to be flagged.

We continue to have excellent portrayal of POC as well – Lily Yu is Asian and informed by her culture and language. It’s more than just a description of her. The Lupi continue to be racially diverse (a leader of Rule’s guard is Jose) as do members of other organisations, the Shadow Unit, et al. Even in a book that doesn’t have that many humans, we still have some POC. We also continue to have awesome female characters – including both the awesome Lily and the Brownie’s, hilarious matriarchal culture.

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