This is a rough one. Really, the book is well written, and the story itself is actually pretty interesting. The world-building impressed me a lot - the dragon culture was fascinating.

But...
Unfortunately, this book was slooooowwww... incredibly slow. This book took me an insanely long time to finish, because I just didn't get sucked into it and kept putting it down. It was full of detailed interactions between people that went nowhere and barely (if at all) advanced the plot. I really felt this story could have been told with half the length, and would have been better for it.

A somewhat different issue - the author clearly wanted to present the issues of LGBT rights and animal rights, but did so in a clumsy and obvious fashion, so that, unfortunately, there's an excessive amount of time spent on the unfairness of the social injustices faced by the LGBT characters (often in the form of their talking about them), and it comes across as a bit unnatural in presentation - more about the issues than the people themselves, as if the characters were LGBT simply so the issues could be talked about. It's good to see more LGBT characters in fiction, but it was just a bit too artificial. And vegan dragons are a bit whimsical, as is the unusual amount of legal resistance faced by human and dragon who talk about animal rights. ( )