Genre: Sci-Fantasy, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Bi, Gay, Intersex, Non-Binary
Reviewer: Estora
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About The Book
Raven’s a thief who just swallowed a dragon. A small one, sure, but now his arms are growing scales, the local wildlife is acting up, and his snarky AI familiar is no help whatsoever.
Raven’s best friend Aik is a guardsman carrying a torch for the thief. A pickpocket and a guard? Never going to happen. And Aik’s ex-fiancé Silya, an initiate priestess in a magical crisis, hates Raven with the heat of a thousand suns.
This unlikely team must work together to face strange beasts, alien artifacts, and a world-altering threat. If they don’t figure out what to do soon, it might just be the end of everything.
Things are about to get messy.
The Review
LOCAL THIEF SWALLOWS DRAGON WHOLE; YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!
Talk about a long overdue review! I first read The Dragon Eater by J. Scott Coatsworth back when it came out in early 2023, but I was also heavily pregnant at the time so I understandably had to put all of my reading, writing and reviewing on hold to give birth. But I’m finally back in reading action, and I decided that 2025 was the perfect year to return to Coatsworth’s fascinating world of Tharassas to continue the series at long last.
But before I could continue the journey with The Gauntlet Runner (#2), The Hencha Queen(#3), and The Death Bringer (#4), I had to return to where it all began in the first book. The thief Raven swallows a dragon, and nothing will ever be the same for him, his best friend/paramour Aik, and Aik’s ex-girlfriend Silya, ever again.
Coatsworth’s talent undeniably lies in worldbuilding. Alien artifacts! Monsters! World-altering revelations! This is an alien world rich in history. It reads initially like a fantasy novel, but the more we learn and pick up from Raven’s familiar (an AI relic of an old human vessel who drops pop culture and modern references that go right over Raven’s head) as well as references to Earth, a colonisation ship, and a past that most people of the world don’t even believe in anymore, you realise that this is actually a sci-fi novel.
I absolutely love it when authors play with genre expectations like that. The mystery behind human existence on this planet, and how and why they have lost so much of their history, is perhaps even more interesting to me than the dragon-eating, possessed gauntlet, and sentient hive-mind plants – as if those weren’t interesting enough!
The big draw of this series for most readers, I suspect, is the blossoming romance between Raven and Aik. But for me, I was delighted and charmed by Silya and her entire storyline as she comes into her own as the priestess who has bonded with the sentient plantlife of the planet known as Hencha. Silya is brash and opinionated, strong yet uncertain, and I found myself eagerly reading to reach her next scene or POV chapter. (Not to mention, a potentially budding relationship with a noble and charming guard…?)
I can’t wait to continue her story in the next installments of Coatsworth’s series. There’s a massive mystery to be discovered, and I am eager to learn the secrets of the world of Tharassas.
The Reviewer
Estora is a long-time reader and writer of LGBT+ speculative fiction.