“But soft, what light thru yonder window breaks? Tis the Gunter having crawled forth from his dungeon.”
With far fewer Asian accents in this book, I better enjoyed Joel Leslie’s narration. He did an admiral job of enunciating and emoting whenever Nikki was referred to as they/them. Or maybe I’ve started to accept that a person keeps being referred to using plural words that usually refer to groups of people. Sadly, my campaign for NB terms like Ne or Nx instead of he or she appears to have withered on the vine. Here, it was only occasionally distracting. Indeed, I was more distracted that diversity meant using a NB character … and then giving Nikki the exact same personality and characteristics as all the other “little ones” paired with all the other grumpy old guys in the previous four books.
If only these were novellas, I’d be more forgiving of the formula squee. Yet again we have the centuries old grumpy, masculine dragon playing sugar daddy to the artsy, tiny, mage who’s never done it before. Sure, the oh-so tiny tweak is that Gunter is the grumpiest dragon yet and Nikki’s pronouns are they/them. But, Nikki’s still got the twigNberries and all the same traits as the previous “girls,” which yet again felt like this was written with the traditional MF archetype and therefore was just vanilla. And, Gunter still grooms, er, I mean courts, his young mage with expensive gifts and the ‘let me take care of all your needs and give you unconditional acceptance and adoration’ idealized romance.
“When in doubt, burn it up.”
As with the previous books, there’s very little screen time devoted to the evil Jaeggi arc. The showdown happens, not thru planning or sleuthing, but via the convenient introduction of a character who can essentially draw them a map. Then it’s the Saturday morning cartoon version of a final confrontation: posturing by the one-note bad guy, things go boom, bad guys vanquished. There is zero surprise as to anything that goes down.
I foolishly got the series during a stacked sale; for me, this peaked at book 1. The smattering of silly/fun parts were too few to have had to trudge through all that formula, and constant mantra of ‘it’s been so hard to be you- but you’re in the Burkhard clan’s LGBTQ utopia now, so hurray! … and let’s have sex.’