I have been on a reading bender the last couple of weeks. It’s been truly lovely to get back into the pages of good books. I discovered two new series. One is called Slayers by C.J. Hill. The other is a really cool take on the classic Beauty and the Beast tale, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas. In this post, I offer a twofer.

Yes, dragons are real, very, terrifyingly real, and they are out for blood.

Tori is a typical teenager; well, maybe not totally typical. Her father is in the running to be the next President of the United States! Summer stretches before her, and she talked her parents into letting her go to dragon camp to feed the obsession with the mythical creatures she’s had all of her life. They all think it’s a history camp where she will learn about Medieval history. They couldn’t be more wrong.

After only a day or two at camp, Tori’s world is rocked by the revelation that dragons are real, and she was born to slay them along with the rest of the advanced campers. Obviously, she has great difficulty adjusting to the news, but she has little time to digest the information because her new-found powers have revealed the existence of two dragon eggs in the possession of their enemy. Overdrake is a dragon lord and is descended from a line of knights that bonded themselves to dragons to control them for nefarious purposes. Worse yet, they are close to hatching! Training kicks into overdrive but distractions abound because, well, they are teenagers and very good looking ones!

Tori and her friends must find a way to learn to work together to defeat not only the dragons but a traitor they know nothing about…yet.

Feyre is a young woman who has taken responsibility for her family, just as she promised her mother she would do. Her family’s fortunes have taken a turn for the worse, and they were forced from their lovely mansion into a hovel where they had to do their own everything…cooking, cleaning, etc. Feyre, the youngest of three girls, is tough and adapts to her new life easily. She hunts the woods with an ash bow and arrow she made for herself. The animals are scarce because they have fled the weather deep into the woods where she dares not go alone. One day she is out hunting and spots a doe eating the bark from a tree. In the same instant, she realizes that she’s not the only one who’s spotted a potential meal. A huge wolf creeps out of the underbrush, stalking the doe. Feyre knows that if she doesn’t do something, her family will starve so just as the wolf strikes down the doe, she lets loose her arrow wounding him. A second arrow through is eye finished him off and secured her family’s food for the rest of the winter.

A few days later, she had sold the pelt of both the doe and the wolf for a pretty penny. When she returned home, an unnatural sound came from the door and a beast shatters his way into her life. It turns out that the wolf was not just a wolf. He was one of the fae and he had been the beast’s friend. Feyre was a murderer in his eyes. He wants her life for the life of his friend. With a sinking heart, she realizes that there’s no way out of this and her family is not going to help her. O accepts her fate but soon finds it both more and less deadly than she thought.