I received Talon as a Goodreads giveaway, and I am extremely glad that I did!

This is an incredibly well-written book. One of those books that makes you lose track of time while reading, so that when you look up to take a break, three hours have passed.

This is a Young Adult novel about Ember Hill, a dragon in human form. She and her twin brother, Dante, have been brought up by an organization of dragons named Talon. Talon grooms young dragons for various roles within its organization after an intense training regimen and integration into the lives of humans. Talon teaches that humans would do anything to kill them, and would because of their numbers, but are infinitely inferior to dragons. To that extent, Talon also warns of a human organization called St. George that was formed for the sole purpose of finding and eradicating dragons. Talon and St. George fight a war behind the scenes, each trying to kill the other without other humans knowing about it.

The book begins with Ember and Dante arriving at their new home away from the Talon training center in the desert, where they had lived all their lives. They know what humans look like, how they act. They have read books, watched movies, had classes that provide information on what makes humans human. Their job is to pretend to be human, make friends, and integrate into society. Once they accomplish this, they will be trained for their roles in Talon.

Ember is not one to take orders well. Despite what she has been taught, she questions everything, much to the annoyance of her trainer, guardians, and her brother. Add in sexy rogue dragon named Riley and St. George soldier named Garrett, you have the right combination for combustion.

There are more positives than negatives to the book. The writing is engaging, and Ember, Garrett, Dante, and Riley are empathetic and engaging characters. I really enjoyed the fact that you know the basics of each character's background, but not the entire story. They slowly come out over the course of the book, and still leave enough questions to be answered in the upcoming books to make you want more.

I did have a couple of issues with Garrett and Ember. Garrett has been trained by St. George from a young age because dragons decimated his family. However, he KNOWS that they are watching Ember because they think she is the dragon they have been looking for. It is a little difficult to believe that Garrett would be chosen for this assignment considering that he has never done anything that normal humans do--never been to a movie, never actually spoken to the opposite sex, etc. And he is supposed to infiltrate the lives of humans to find the dragon. His cover story is that he works for his father in Chicago and that he is doing some work for him in California. His inexperience proves that he's never lived in a city, and Ember doesn't question this, even though she's been told from the very beginning of her life that St. George will do anything to get close enough to kill her.

I cannot wait for the next installment! ( )

I hate the love triangle, but I love books about dragons and forbidden love and rebelling against a fascist company/society/organization. ( )

audio book. Really enjoyed thus! Can't wait for the next one now ( )

I was seriously underwhelmed with everything: the writing was awkward (at best), the characters were flat and predictable and the worldbuilding was seriously lacking. As others have pointed out this has the premise of dragons that can take human form yet most parts of the book is just spent focusing on your average teen romance, with hints of something larger going one even though it's never developed or explored.

I should know better than to read books with dragons that are actually just shapeshifting humans, it's never good. If you can't be bothered to deal with the logistics of having an actual dragon in your novel, the size, the viciousness, the magic, then don't bother at all. This half-dragons are always boring as hell and while this author seems to think she had this really creative thing going on, it's pretty much exactly like Firelight. I'm not saying Julie Kagawa ripped off that or anything, I'm saying she - and every other YA author on the planet, it seems - ripped off Twilight and was as predictable as all Twilight-ripoffs. Just once, I'd like to see the girl be a monster and the guy be the normal human, and no, that reverse Twilight-book does not count.

Yees, the """""twist""""" here is that they're actually dragons shapeshifting into humans and not the other way around, but you can't tell that for more than a sentence or two at the beginning. After a while the main character - Ember (clever, huh?) - starts refering to the dragon part of herself as "my dragon" the same way whatshername in 50 shades refers to her inner goddess. It's not good and it doesn't make any sense, stop referring to your true self as "my something" and giving it a pronoun of its own - IT'S YOU. "My inner dragon wanted to snarl but I walked on" would have been fivehundred times more interesting the other way around: "I wanted to snarl but my human form walked on" or something like that. It would have made her feel way more dragon-y, but I guess we need a relatable main character so then she has to be so much like a human there's not trace of dragonness in her. BORING.

It's also weird that all the characters to this. We get the POV of another dragon and he's ALSO refering to "his dragon" and the hot/boring enemy love interest refers to a part of himself as "my soldier". Because giving all your characters a separate voice when writing out of their POV is just way more timeconsuming than it's worth, I guess.

Honestly at first I thought this was written by a first-time author and was willing to cut her some slack for the bad prose, but she's written TWO SERIES prior to this? Inexcusable. Honestly, there are 137 different YA tropes in this that we've seen before but none of those are what I mostly associate this book with, that would be the "As you know, Bob"-trope. Sooooo much awkward dialog where charachters just explain things to each other that they already know. And seriously, you don't need to invent some sort of lame-ass excuse to describe things in the book, you can just describe how people look.

The romance was almost believable because of the very similar backstories of the characters involved, but the love at first sight-thing didn't work, please, can we just get rid of that shit? I'm so sick of it.

Other things I just can't with:

- Firebrand as a nickname. It was even worse in the Swedish translation, but even in English it's just ridiculous. Flame would have been better, shorter, AND it would have matched his feelings towards her ...

- The very supersecret speshul dragon name ... COBALT. HAHHAHAH what!? He made such a big deal out of his true dragon name and not wanting to reveal it blah blah, and then it's fucking COBALT. An English word???????? I mean shouldn't it be something like Chrysophylax or Nidhögg or "a sound that could only be told in dragon speech that sounded like roaring fire and was meant to describe the gorgeous color of this deep blue scales" ... No, it's fucking Cobalt.

- "We're a supersecret organization that's been hunting and killing dragons for centuries. Our best soldier is a teenaged boy."

- How would Garret know that the beer he drinks tastes "cheap" when he has never had a drink before? lol

- Ember wondering why people wanna kill dragons when they've done nothing even though every other dragon in the story has implied that humans are an inferior race that they wanna kill off

There was probably more but I'm getting tired. I hated the book for the first 100 pages but it got slightly better after that, but I'm still not giving it a good grade. At least with Firelight I know it was gonna be a cheezy teen romance the second I picked it up, but this pretended that it was gonna be more and that's more offensive, so even though this is probably - objetively - better than Firelight, I'm still rating it lower. And there ain't shit you can do about it. ( )

2.5 Stars ( )