Review: I Dream of Dragons by Ashlyn Chase (2016)

Boston Dragons, Book 1

This book was pretty good. A decent, fluffy read. Not amazing, but not terrible. There wasn’t anything I loooooved about it, but also nothing I hated about it. More like, some things I liked, and some things that I found irritating.

The story is basically: Rory (a dragon) and Amber (the newly anointed Muse of Air Travel) (yes, really) both want this excellent apartment in Boston. An affordable brownstone in Boston is hard to find! The owners accidentally rent it to both of them, so they are both camping there. Whoever leaves first, loses the apartment. For bonus fun, the building is full of other paranormal folks. Also, there are some shenanigans regarding stolen leprechaun treasure. Overall, the plot is pushed forward by various small moments of pettiness and misunderstanding, rather than some ridiculous plot perpetuated by an evil villain, which is nice! Some paranormals run pretty dark, so knowing about light-hearted paranormal reading options is always a good thing.

Rory and Amber have decent chemistry. They immediately have the hots for each other, but this is tempered by the fact that they are directly competing for this apartment. They don’t trust each other, and each engage in bits of sabotage in order to make the apartment theirs. Makes for good banter.

Once they admit their attraction, they also have a completely sensible and necessary conversation about things like birth control and STIs. Granted, this conversation is instigated entirely by Amber, and Rory is basically like, well, I can’t have kids with anyone who’s not a dragon, and what are STIs? I still appreciated the fact that Chase included this talk at all. And speaking of kids, I also appreciated that Amber explicitly does not want them, and therefore the problem of interspecies mating is not a problem at all. She explicitly states that she wants to be a DINK (twice). She doesn’t fall in love and then suddenly want a baby.

The sex scenes have enough detail that you can tell what’s happening and that both parties are enjoying it. I did roll my eyes at Rory’s magic dragon penis though, which is extraordinarily large. In fact it is so girthy that Amber’s finger and thumb don’t touch when she holds it in her hands. Let me repeat that statement: it is SO GIRTHY THAT HER FINGER AND THUMB DON’T TOUCH WHEN SHE HOLDS IT IN HER HANDS. Does she have tiny hands? Wouldn’t that hurt??? (Apparently not, because she’s a goddess now, and can change the size of her vagina. Presumably, that means she could make herself tighter if he had a micro-penis, but Chase didn’t go in that direction for some mysterious reason.)

The imagined world of an apartment building full of paranormals is a fun setting for a string of paranormal comedies. However, this also contributed to one irritating component of this book. There is a HUGE cast of secondary characters, many of whom big Chase fans have already met. Like, having secondary characters who are primary characters in other books can be fun, but do we need to have literally every single one of her previous characters appear? (I call this: Stephanie Laurens syndrome.) Even though this is *technically* the first book in a new series, it takes place in the same world – the same apartment building even – as two previous series. So, we have literally everyone from the Flirting with Fangs series and the Strange Neighbors series appear here. It’s at least a dozen characters whose stories have been told elsewhere. Which also means that the secondary characters are all sort of cursory, and we don’t see how different types of paranormal folks would actually interact in a real way.

One exception to my secondary character irritation is Mother Nature, because she cracked me up. Very batty, but also very powerful.

The worst secondary character, on the other hand, is Chad the Gross Ghost. I get that he’s supposed to be comic relief, but mainly he lurks around making trouble that makes no sense. Why does he decide to make Amber detach her soul from her body, to give one example of things that he does that makes no sense whatsoever? Is he matchmaking? Is he trying to freak her out? It seems like his entire motivation is: he’s bored, so he does random things. Also, he likes to watch the hot redhead who now lives in his old apartment take showers. (!!!!)

I also did not appreciate the seriously regressive gender bullshit happening. Rory must protect and care for his younger sisters. Who are literally a thousand years old. Because they are girls. Also, even though Rory can cook – he makes a stew at one point – he will probably never cook again. Amber makes a comment about learning to cook from Shannon (Rory’s sister who is a kitchen wiz to give her some character trait besides being in love with a teenager and weepy about it) so that she can cook for Rory in the future. What? Why? Isn’t the point of being a DINK getting take-out whenever you want??? Especially if you don’t already enjoy cooking? (I mean, maybe she does, but she spends literally no time thinking about the kitchen before this moment at the end of the book.)

And finally: OMG the Irish accents were soooo bad. Rory is an Irish dragon, by the way. I was seriously waiting for him to say “They’re after me lucky charms!” because he says “me” instead of “my” all the time and no real Irish person talks like that. (Source: I have Irish relatives.) Fecking idjits indeed.

---

Buy Now: Amazon