Okay for the record Charlotte and I are friends. And even though this is a massive fangirl review I am actually being really honest about everything. I can’t help it if it’s just that good. It’s not my fault. It’s Charlotte’s. Blame her. Go on.

For a long time reading this, my mind was nothing but incomprehensible fangirling. And that’s weird, because I consider Charlotte a friend, and not someone to whom I can bestow the whole ‘mentor-fangirl’ relationship on. Normally those kinds of relationships are strictly for people I don’t know: you know, like celebrities. But I fell into it regardless, because this is honestly the best debut indie-published novel I’ve ever read.

EVER.

I mean, this book just makes me want to give up writing.

And yes, I went into this novel prejudiced against self-published books. I know, I’m one to talk, right? There is a whole bunch of crap out there. Poorly written, poorly edited, poorly formatted novels with crap covers that look like a six year old made it in MS Paint. Even plagiarised stuff makes it to the market. Self-publishing has a bad name. People are prejudiced. Even when you consider that a lot of legacy books have bad messages and incomprehensible plots and characters that should just die because they are too stupid to live.

Anyone can write. That’s true. But it takes real talent to write well.

I hope that the market gets flooded with more stuff like Draykon. I didn’t expect Charlotte’s book to be crap, not by any stretch of the imagination…

I just didn’t expect it to be SO DAMN GOOD.

Charlotte has an obvious gift for beautiful prose and many a time I caught myself drooling over her wonderfully constructed sentences. Her word choices are elegant and I hate her for it. Not really. Or do I? She doesn’t just choose simple words to get the point across, either, but words that are musical and almost seem to jump off the page. Harmonious, that’s what it is. But I didn’t have to crack open my dictionary to discover the meaning of any of the words. It was just nice clean beautiful prose, and ten times better than a lot of legacy books out there. Both the voice and the style have been developed beautifully and executed better than I expected.

Her characterisations are very fine and three dimensional. Often I could feel Eva’s susceptibility to the cold and Llandry’s social anxiety, which were both large parts of the character identification. They even had different voices, which is rare to find in indie fiction. That’s why this book is a gem, people! I loved the way Eva dealt with people and could feel the pressure on her to succeed and be seen to be successful. And there are much worse things than being in Llandry’s head as she suffers and deals with her social anxiety.

I would have liked to know how Llandry developed from the fearless child into the anxious wreck she is as an adult, but Draykon has a sequel, Lokant, and I hope we’ll find out there.

Sigwide was so adorably cute. Charlotte clearly has a gift for writing non-anthropomorphised fantasy animals. I loved reading about him: his reactions all seemed very real and he was just so cute! Where can I get an orting?

The worldbuilding was rather lovely. I’m not sure I have a firm grasp on everything, because it’s unlike anything I’ve read before. A lot of the clearly non-human sentient people were called humans, even when they had wings, for example, so I’m still trying to come to terms with that. I don’t fully understand why there needed to be the land and Cloak divide between the Daylanders and the Darklanders but I imagine it came about as the people grew more aware that they could manipulate their own environment, much like the benefits of electricity for us real-world humans. After all, if you’re a nocturnal creature, what could be better than night all the time? And if you have sorcerers able to do that sort of thing, why not give yourself a natural advantage?

The only thing I will mention that was not perfect (besides the occasional typo – not more so than any legacy published novel, so it’s not an issue, and the ever so slight ‘who said that?’ moment when it came to dialogue) is the fight scenes. They seemed not as perfect as the rest of the prose. Polished, yes, and lovingly written, that much is obvious. It doesn’t in any way let the novel down, but after growing accustomed to Charlotte’s high standard prose, her descriptions which never became overwhelming and were just enough to build the world in my head, her wonderful characterisations and the very real relationships between the characters, the fight scenes by comparison (and remember, everything else was top-notch) seemed a little weak, a little off in pace. Almost like a tuba solo in the middle of a glorious symphony. Perhaps Charlotte is not comfortable writing violence, or not as practiced as her gorgeous political banter, high societal manners, and worldbuilding that I enjoyed reading about so much.

That being said, I need to reiterate that the fight scenes were still of a higher quality than I’ve read in legacy books. They just don’t seem to match the rest of the novel in its perfection.

As for the plot: well, she wasn’t kidding when she billed it as a fantasy mystery. After the appropriate amount of building questions, the revelations were revealed at just the right time. I thought the plot was going one way and it ended up going another way. I also have a suspicious mind so I kept expecting a certain character who shall not be named (view spoiler)[Dev (hide spoiler)] to be a betrayer, the sort of ‘Ha ha ha, I’ve been playing with you all along’ type thing, but that didn’t happen. The novel seems quite innocent in that regard. Almost everything was neatly wrapped up at the end, with just enough left unanswered to make a sequel appealing.

It’s not a YA book, but it’s a clean read and because of Llandry’s not-quite-grown-up attitude it could be marketed so. I believe a lot of young people would be able to relate to Llandry’s need for independence and her overbearing and overprotective parents wanting to keep her safe.

I’m really looking forward to Lokant, and the third book in the series that I know Charlotte is currently writing.