2.5
This isn't horrible, but it's too long by half and heavily dependent on two people not having a conversation that the continued avoidance of feels manipulated and unnatural. Further, there's very little character development and almost no actual characters beyond the two main ones. I also have questions about these all important dragon souls. It's an interesting idea, but not nearly well enough explained. All in all, it's a sweet story, but it's a poorly executed book.

This book has an interesting idea and has dragons so... yeah, I was expecting quite a lot. And some of my expectations were disappointed because it's a good read, yes, but it's not a book... it's more a long story, and they're not the same thing!
In a book we have characters with depths, and if the book is a good book then we have also secondary characters of some relevance, and the story happens while we are reading, we see the same things that the characters see, we feel what they feel and so on... in a story we have the main characters, and we know quite a lot about them, yes, but they lack something, they aren't so well characterized as in books, the story is just told and we don't live it with the characters, the secondary characters are almost non-existent and all is almost but not enough.
And that's the case with this book.
It's not that I didn't like it, I liked it a lot, I liked the writing, the writing is really good because it's vivid and full of life, some parts seem painted and not just written, and that was great! Also, the two characters were good, but I wanted more, both from them and from the secondary (we don't have them, argh!).
There are a lot of good ideas in there, but I wasn't satisfied with the reading, even if I enjoyed it and it was quite pleasant.

I requested this book because I found the blurb intriguing and felt it would at least be an interesting read, if nothing else. I'm glad I did.

This book was fascinating. You could tell that the world-building around the dragons was well thought out because it showed in its fantastic delivery. I loved reading all about dragon lore in this story and how their physical and magical characteristics affected their lives as well as the lives of the physical world around them.

This story made me FEEL. It made me feel so much for Ark and Orsie as lonely individuals, feel again as they discovered each others presence, feel during their time apart and feel even MORE when they finally found each other. The palpable feelings that these two had for each other overshadowed every other thing (including lack of sexy times) and it was a joy to read. Oh and whenever Orise called Ark "my soul", I damn near swooned in my seat. Ugh such good feeeeels!

I must admit that the story dragged a tad bit during their time apart. However, it wasn't so slow to the extent of causing me to lose interest in the book. I guess I just needed my two MCs to finally get to each other and stop the aching they went through.

Ultimately and from my rating, its obvious I loved this book and I will definitely be picking up anything else by Ava Kelly I come across. Definitely.