I’m totally cheating here, and giving you the cover copy because it does a much better job of explaining the plot than I could:

On a hike deep in the Rocky Mountains, Kai Monahan watches as a dozen dragons–actual freaking dragons–battle beneath a fat white moon. When one crashes nearly dead at her feet and transforms into a man, Kai does the only thing a decent person could: she grabs the nearest sword and saves his life.

As the dragon/man, Rhys, recovers from the attack, a chance brush of skin against skin binds him inextricably to Kai. Becoming heartsworn to a human–especially such a compelling one–is the last thing Rhys wants. But with an ancient enemy gathering to pit dragons against humanity and his strength nearly depleted, Kai has just become the one thing Rhys needs. A complete bond will give him the strength to fight; a denied bond means certain death.

Kai is terrified at the thought of allowing any dragon into her mind…or her heart. Accepting the heartswearing and staying with the dragons means sacrificing everything, and Kai must decide if her freedom is worth risking Rhys’s life–a life more crucial to the fate of humanity than she could possibly know.

I really, really like dragons. Dragon mythology, dragon illustrations, dragon movies, sequels to dragon movies, and pretty much anything having to do with dragons.

I figured it was about time I indulged my two favorite things in one sitting, much like the brilliance of whomever combined chocolate and peanut butter (or chocolate, peanut butter, and salt, which is even more delicious). I searched for “dragon” and “romance” and came up with a hell of a reading list. When I repeated that search on NetGalley, this book popped up, and I figured, why the hell not? Mountain climbing heroine, dragon shifter hero…. I’m in!

If you only read one paragraph of a review, this is the one to read, I think. It’s really difficult for me to simply answer the question of whether I liked this book, because it has a goddam mother trucking cliff hanger ending. It’s book one of a trilogy and also did I mention there’s a cliffhanger, because DAMMIT I HATE THOSE.

And it’s not just one cliff. It’s several. There are a bunch of unfinished plot threads, and none are resolved satisfactorily by the last page. There are all kinds of dragon cliffhangers and flying off into the night with Major Unfinished Business, and, well, I guess I like to be warned that the ending is cliffy. Because there’s a lot of cliff in this book. It’s like a whole mountain range that gets cut off in the middle. So much so that at the end, everything I thought about the story was stained by the unsatisfying ending. I had a feeling of dread as more problems piled up and I got closer to the last pages. When I finished the book, cliff hanger confirmed, I was…a particular kind of grumpy. Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by self published anthologies that promise, “no cliffhangers!” I love that promise. I want that on a seal. Like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, only in this case, I’d have wanted a Cliffhanger Seal of Disapproval.

So, in case you’re not clear, and I promise I’ll shut up about it (no, not really, I don’t promise at all because DAMMIT CLIFFHANGER), there’s a cliffhanger ending, and because it left so much unresolved, and I mean a LOT (which I can’t get into without spoiling the heck out of the story), that lack of satisfaction tinged my impression of the book as a whole. My negative feelings about the ending (or lack thereof) affected everything else I thought about this book. I’m not sure what color cliffhanger grumpy is, but whatever shade it might be, imagine that spray painted all over this review. Maybe it’s puce.

The other problem with the puce grumpy tinge is that it makes the annoying things stand out more, like the puce grumpy tinge needs company in the form of Things that Were Mildly Bothersome that they can coalesce into a more solidified Additional Reason to Be Grumpy.

For example: the heroine repeats over and over and over at least once a chapter about how her mother is overbearing, pushy, and over-protective. Kai was a former gymnast who had potential Olympic aspirations, and her mom had something to do with her deciding to quit, but all the text provides is the repetitive insistence that Kai’s mom was A Problem, and her being missing because she’s been kidnapped by Dragon Dude and his Dragon Friends was going to be A Bigger Problem because her mom was going to Worry and Never Let Her Out of the House Again. Or Something.

Meanwhile, in the only scene we have of Kai’s mother speaking for herself, she’s not at all overbearing or pushy and doesn’t resemble any of the limited number of words that Kai used to describe her. She’s a normal mother, or at least she seemed so to me.

That’s the biggest problem I had with the book aside from the ending: the narration kept telling me things by insisting upon them. Kai’s mother is overprotective and pushy. Kai felt smothered by her. The fact that Kai’s missing means that her parents are going to freak out and never let her leave the house again — and that’s the only thing we hear about her parents or her brother. She says she has as difficult relationship, but she doesn’t say why. She talks about gymnastics in passing, but she doesn’t explain more than that. She talks briefly about mountain climbing and how not doing something strenuous with her body makes her twitchy, but the results only show up when it’s time for said twitchiness to make something happen plot-wise. Kai has plot-convenient twitches. But none of those assertions are entirely supported by anything else in the story.

You could mix and match the following elements and they’d appear in every chapter:

1. Kai doesn’t want to stay with Rhys and the others but she can’t leave because she’s in a cave on the top side of a mountain.

2. Her parents are going to kill her/keep her inside/put a tracking bracelet on her/never let her out of their sight/put her in house arrest.

3. Kai understands the stakes of the dragon war, and those stakes are huge, but (cue whining) what about heeeeeerrrrrrr?

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Her best friend Juli has a subplot but it mostly serves to highlight an alternate path, because when Juli is heartsworn to another dragon, she gets annoyed, but it doesn’t seem to affect her negatively beyond that. She’s irritated to be followed around by an overprotective dragon dude, but we don’t know enough of Juli’s character to understand the differences between “before being heartsworn” and “after being heartsworn.” She might as well have been the same person. Who knows?

Plus, Juli’s protestations of being bothered by her mate’s habit of telling her what to do aren’t meaningful either, because she still does whatever it is he tells her to do, either out of compulsion or because deep down she might really want to anyway or whatever. I couldn’t tell. All the action indicates that despite her annoyance at being heartsworn, she seems to be happy, or at least content and accepting. The narration says one thing; the plot does something else. The conflict that’s insisted upon by the narration never shows up in any scene or chapter.

The other thing that bugged me was the obviousness of the virginity stand-ins: first, Rhys and Kai touching is not ok. Ok, they touched, but whoa, there, dude. Kissing is not ok. OK, they kissed. But then Kai opening her mind for some kind of mind-meld, that’s not ok. Those barriers that Kai jumped over and hid behind each successive chapter evolved into Not Being Honest and Withholding Information, which then became a Big Mis, which is only second to Cliff Hanger on my list of Things that Make Me Use Capital Letters.

There’s a lot to the world here, but it was only explored superficially. There was so much potential for awesome, too, which is why the negatives highlighted by the unsatisfying ending are so frustrating for me. There are so many different dragon cultures mentioned in the story – but only barely. There were different dragon appearances, but not nearly enough descriptions. The story only offers cursory explanations of the different individuals in power, and their roles. There’s some royalty and inheritance issues, but the rank and hierarchy is unclear a lot of the time. I wanted more dragons, basically, and less Kai-whining.

More dragons is pretty much my solution to everything at this point.

Except not Rhys and his group. I could deal with less of them. For a lot of the story, Kai is kept in a position of disadvantage and ignorance because Rhys and his crew don’t tell her everything until the very last minute. They exclude her ostensibly for her safety but they don’t explain that reasoning fully either. She wants to make choices for herself but she can’t make the right choices because she doesn’t have all the information. Kai being kept at Perpetual Disadvantage creates Kai Whining and navel gazing and that got old in a hurry.

There was so much potential for depth, for more layers to the heroine, to the hero and his friends, and for more evolution for the other characters. I wanted more. I didn’t get it, and then there was a cliffhanger.

Will I read book 2? Probably not. I’d have been tempted to continue if any of the major problems raised in book one were resolved by the end, but so little was satisfactorily addressed, I’ve got a major case of the “Mehs.” I’m curious about the dragon politics in this book, and I wish the world building had included a lot more about them, but Kai’s incessant whining, combined with narration and plot that contradicted one another and that cliffhanger ending really, really turned me off.