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Okay, with the title and subtitle, my original thought that this would be a look at draconic culture where power politics flows around and through the aspects of mating, and you know, not getting killed in the world.

I was a bit off. The titular mating flight is supposed to be more about picking a good mate, and hopefully love will come later. But it’s not supposed to all power and practicality either. There’s twelve years for the dragons to figure out where their lives are going. Since there’s always more males than females, a flight is normally three females and six males who have recently hit sexual maturity, and they go off away from parents to find who the females will choose, and have a bit of debauchery along the way, as fertilizing eggs is actually an involved process. So… nine very large and powerful adolescents on spring break for twelve years.

And in this case, nothing typical happens

There’s a large multiverse of worlds out there, some of which are ruled by dragons, some of which they haven’t gotten to. And nowhere, apparently, has been able to stand up to dragons who decide they want a place. The plan is to go to Hove, a “basic torroid” world (i.e., in the interior of a donut-shaped space), hang out for a duo-decade to figure things out, but not actually take over or anything inconvenient like that. That doesn’t go well.

Our viewpoint character is Jyothky, who hits sexual maturity a bit late at the start of the book, setting all this in motion, and keeps a diary of what’s going on. She is in a technical sense, disabled; she has no sense of touch. There are spells that let her monitor if anything has happened to her body, but it’s not the same thing. This also means that while she’s on a mating flight, she’s basically ace, there’s no feedback from the act, no endorphins, or any other positive feedback from the act, just the general sense/duty of wanting to have kids at some point.

By the end of the book, we’ve seen just how misfit all the dragons are even as they cause mayhem for the poor world that has ended up playing host to them, and trouble spreads in their wake over the course of a mere hundred days.

This is really just part one of two, so be ready to dive right into the second book if you read this. It is quite enjoyable, with Jyothky being a great sympathetic narrator, even with the amount of devastation that happens in Hove as it was struggling with it’s own version uni-polar politics.