Mishel Reviews: Maiden Flight - Bianca D'Arc

Series or Stand Alone: Dragon Knights series, book one

Release Date:  September 2013 – paperback (First Published February 2006) 

Publisher: Samhain

Pages:  173

Author Site:  http://biancadarc.com/

My Rating: 3.5/5 

Source: Kindle Freebie

Cover: I don’t like the original cover – at all. The new cover is nice though – everyone on there is good looking and a dragon is included, thumbs up!

War is coming for the dragon knights…but love may find them first.

A chance meeting with a young male dragon seals the fate of one adventurous female poacher. The dragon’s partner, a ruggedly handsome knight named Gareth, takes one look at the shapely woman and decides to do a little poaching of his own.

Sir Gareth both seduces and falls deeply in love with the girl who is not only unafraid of dragons but also possesses a rare gift—she can hear the beasts’ silent speech. He wants her for his mate, but mating with a knight is no simple thing. To accept a knight, a woman must also accept the dragon, the dragon’s mate…and her knight, Lars, too.

She is at first shocked, then intrigued by the lusty life in the Lair. But war is in the making and only the knights and dragons have a chance at ending it before it destroys their land and their lives.  

This book has been revised for rerelease.

Product Warnings: Contains dragons, their sexy knights and a damsel who is not quite in distress. Sizzling hot m/f/m scenes may leave you breathing fire.

Review:

Apparently I have a thing for dragons, and there aren’t even any shifters in here, go figure! I was actually pretty surprised at how much I liked the plot of Maiden Flight. A lot of the story was world building, character introduction, and crazy hot m/f/m sexytimes. This is my first ménage a trios read so it’s exciting to get something new under the reading belt. Being a short kindle freebie I was pretty satisfied overall. I’ve read some reviews that mention how similar this is to Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series and I can’t comment on that because I haven’t had the chance to start her books yet. I can do some similarities between authors and the worlds they create but I really don’t like copycats, just saying. I hope I don’t find out in the future that it was a little too alike for my tastes…

The storyline concept was actually really interesting if not a little over-the-top. The dragons are intelligent, fierce, and very loyal warriors. They are matched with a human knight that they can telepathically communicate with. But the bond doesn’t stop there – the dragons are unable to mate until their knight counterparts find their mate first. Why, might you ask? Well knight and dragon have such a unique bond that they can actually feel what the other feels. So in other words the dragon sex drive is so strong that it would drive their knight insane if they had no mate to run to. This exceptional fact made all the sex scenes pretty fascinating. If there was human sex, there was sure to be dragon sex involved as well, and vice versa. This I could handle. The insta-love on the other hand I had an issue with.

I mentioned in a previous review that I used to absolutely adore the idea of love at first sight. It’s such a dreamy and romantic idea that I still sometimes like to daydream about it. But reality and reading well-paced romantically involved books has shifted my judgment. I find myself actually cringing and rolling my eyes pretty far in the back of my head when insta-love hits a heroine and/or hero. Sadly in Maiden Flight’s case the couple (and the third-wheel!) gets hit pretty hard. Now of course once I got my eyes to focus in their proper position I just accepted the fact that it was part of the story. After that I could enjoy most of what was going on.  I actually enjoyed the romantic situation between the heroine’s mother and her perspective beau. It was slower-paced and much more realistic. 

Although there wasn’t much of a plot to be found I still enjoyed the book. I liked Maiden Flight so much that I went ahead and bought the next couple of books to see how the story progresses. I am hoping the sex scenes become a little bit more creative and the characters get more fleshed out. I’m hoping for more of the plot to come to the forefront about the war going on, the politics within the Lair, and I’d like to see more interaction between the characters. I like me some sex but I also like some dialogue, some intrigue, something, anything really. Hopefully I’ll get some of that with the upcoming books.