What I’m Reading: May Dawson’s Dragon Royals series

I’m struggling in my haul through Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, so I decided to go for something different. I’m a sucker for reverse harems these days, Romance in general, but even tropes, as long as they are done well, are prefect for the kind of escapist reading I’m looking for these days.

I downloaded a sample of May Dawson’s Dragon Royals series from a Facebook Ad (I download a lot of samples that way, though more often than not I’m disappointed.) Before I got a few pages in I knew I was going to keep reading.

The series is part Chosen One, part Cinderella, and part political intrigue. Honor is the rebellious step child of a once great Lord who weathered scandal by taking her in. Believed to be the child of his mistress, she feels guilt for destroying his world before he he passed. She’s trying to support her half sister from the abuse of their evil stepmother (who totally killed their father) by working as a maid at The Academy, where the predator shapeshifters train to defend the kingdom from the threat of the zombie Scourge.

Then she falls in love with the Dragon Royals, a group of six men, born by magic, to be the next rulers of the island.

This series is delightfully complex, though a bit convoluted by the end. The young adult dragon royals are involved in their own conspiracy against their fathers, who have gone to extreme and abusive lengths to maintain their power. The presence of a female dragon, Honor, exposes not just the worst sides of their fathers, but the truth of their pasts, from overthrowing the last true king, to their roles in the curse affecting the entire land that also created the Scourge.

I enjoyed the piece by piece reveal of an entire history and culture of the island before the story starts. I enjoyed that none of the male leads were really buying into the culture of oppression built by their fathers even before the books begin. They had their own goals and their own plots going on and becoming entangled with Honor only complicated things. I might be sadistic, as well, but I enjoyed that the men, though entitled and powerful, still paid a price to follow their hearts, both in their relationships with honor and in who they want to be and how they want to rule.

There are obvious tropes present. Honor is a Cinderella, she’d bad at her job but still keeps it. She’s bullied and endangered. But it doesn’t feel flat or cliche. Even her abusers come off as real people with real motivations of their own in the context of the world setting.

Somehow, Dawson also manages to add a power creep that doesn’t exactly make things easier on the characters, or make them magically more powerful than their foes.

As for the romance and sex, the sex scenes are blisteringly fun (OMG, the scene where they are under the influence of the sirens will remain one of my favorites), and manage to include multiple men in ways without only exploring multiple orifices’. The men are unique, and they all are allowed unique relationships with Honor. By the end, when there are eight of them and the plot is on an intense civil and international war, their characters get a little thin, but I have mixed feelings because that area of the books also allows to the heroine to maintain a huge amount of personality and agency of her own. She refuses to be tucked away by her men, and in fact, has to run away from them to stay true to who she needs to be as a person. I like the idea that they all get to be people first and relationships second.

The Cons are: Each book ends on a cliffhanger. I didn’t mind as much because none of them felt drawn out for space. Each had a satisfying level of complex plot and relationship plot. But a lot of readers are against this. Heck, I’m usually against this, but again, there are a lot of tropes or things like that that I found forgivable in the context of the good, engaging writing.

I think the author herself sort of lost track of how the world was developing because certain things from the beginning were just dropped with no resolution. (Was Alis really Honor’s parents’ surrogate??) And, as a reader of many genres, the civil/national warring in the last two books racked up a body count that felt rather…minimized. But then it’s almost like the author had to realign her own genre mixing style to stick to the romance angle rather than exploring fantasy with a romance storyline. But the plot never felt too thin or idealistic.

I do recommend this series, for erotic readers and fantasy romance readers as well. It’s fun, made me laugh out loud a lot, and is sexy as hell without being contrived or boring.  I sped through it in about a week–despite each book being 300-400pages– and at $2.99 a book (or on Kindle Unlimited) it’s not a huge hit to the bank account either.