A heartening story of a warrior carved out to be ruthless and unarmoured to be soft. We follow them through the making of their character as an adult and the tumultuous re-orienting of herself to home and tenderness. The language is rich and knight-era keeping you immersed in this world.

Reminiscent of Priory of the Orange Tree, but more enclosed and beautifully written.

Priory of the Orange Tree was one of my favorite reads in 2023. Neon Yang has written a novella with similar vibes and less of a cast, plus Asian. Am absolutely in love with this book. I need a special edition!

I am a little confused with how the cover fits in to the description of the main character, if I am honest, but it is still very cool looking.

This was a fun, short read. I really liked the main character--I appreciated her slowly opening up and revealing more about herself, and her exploration of the impact of colonization and her place in the empire on her own culture and family history. The main "twist" was fairly obviously projected early on but I didn't feel like the impact was necessarily supposed to come exclusively from the big reveal so I didn't mind. I could have done with a tiny bit more development of the main relationship. Still, for a novella, I think it did a good job in a limited number of pages.

Really enjoyable, and I would pick up another book from this author for sure.

I truly enjoyed this read! Short and full of the adventure I craved. You follow the FMC Yeva as she is forced to return to her homeland to find and kill the country's dragon. Along the way you discover Lady Sookhee's secret ( Yeva took a little longer to figure it out but I saw it coming and that is okay!) the girl-king with a weird illness. I loved how short this book was, it was exactly what I needed in between heavy fantasy reads!

Big thank you NetGalley and to the publisher for the chance to review this book pre-release. Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame was a quicker read than I anticipated it being, but I loved every moment of it. It was full of adventure, and I loved the romance! A more formal review will be available on my IG/TikTok and Goodreads for release.

A 4/5 read!

A full review will be published closer to the release on Muses of Media (musesofmedia.ca)

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for this advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was a great fantasy novella. A renowned disabled queer female dragon slayer who never takes her gear off gets sent to a neighboring kingdom to investigate the presence of dragons and ends up slowly finding her humanity instead. Well written and enjoyable I just wish I felt more connected to the characters.

4/5 Stars – A Lyrical Tale of Identity and Transformation
Beautifully crafted novella that intertwines duty, identity, and self-discovery. Yeva, is a masked dragon slayer who is sent into her mission to the land of Quanbao, where dragons are revered rather than hunted. Themes of transformation resonate profoundly with as much world building and folklore as you can punch into a novella. If You want fantasy with sapphic undertones, this short read will do the trick.

Sapphic fantasy with a lesbian Mandalorian hunting for dragons?! Amazing. Top-notch worldbuilding with excellent characters, intrigue, and romance.

I read Brighter Than Scale a day after rereading The Black Tides of Heaven – which made it pretty clear that the former just doesn’t compare.

Everything about Brighter Than Scale should work – the characters, the dragons, the worldbuilding, Yeva’s character arc. It’s a recipe that seems guaranteed to blow us away, especially from this author!

And the beginning is very strong. Yeva slays a (small!) dragon as a child, and is sent away to a soul-crushing order of knights to be trained. They forge her into a weapon, a machine; by the time the story really gets going, she’s barely a person. It’s heartbreaking and enraging and I wanted the father who sent her to them dropped off a cliff.

But once Yeva gets to Quanbao, all the promise the story had dissolves into dust. The pacing is a mess; simultaneously too slow – in that nothing seems to happen, pages after pages just dragging – and too fast – the gradual undoing of Yeva’s depersonalisation, for example, isn’t shown to us, but told to us. Worse, it’s summarised to us. And the entire book hinges on this! Yeva realising how close Quanbao’s culture and language are to that of her home; her complicated feelings about engaging with them; her first baby-steps in exploring and engaging with these things, trying to find her own through them. Relearning how to be a person. More than anything else, Yeva’s character-arc is the story – and it’s so frustrating, and puzzling, to not see it, to have it skimmed over and kind of handwaved rather than explored.

We don’t see the relationship develop between Yeva and Sookhee, either. Days after finishing the book, I still have no idea what drew them to each other. I can’t even call it instalust; there’s just nothing between them. These are two people who have every reason in the world not to trust each other, to despise each other, even! You’re going to have to be extremely convincing to sell me on their loving each other enough to overcome all the things in their way. And Yang doesn’t do that at all.

I mean, there isn’t much of Yeva to draw anyone. She’s a very one-note character – and that makes perfect sense! For the first chunk of the book, it’s very effective, even: she’s been brutalised into thinking of herself as a tool, an object, so of course there’s not a whole lot of personality there. But I was expecting her to develop a personality, to see her finding local foods she especially liked, learning the names of native flora, stumbling her way through books. It would have been so easy to give her an interest, or pleasure in, clothing, given that it’s a whole Thing that she has pretty much lived in her armour all her adult life, and Sookhee is the one who gets her out of it. (…Not in a sex way! Although that as well, I guess!) Give her some kind of likes and dislikes, interests, thoughts!

As-is…I don’t know what Sookhee saw in Yeva, because there didn’t seem to be anything to see.

I did like that Yang subverted expectations during the climax; Yeva doesn’t do what I think most of us would expect her to do, and Sookhee puts the practical over sentiment at the end of the finale, something I always like to see characters doing in such moments. The final pages were…predictable, but in a satisfying way, so I’m not critiquing them.

Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame by Neon Yang falls very flat. The premise is incredible; the execution is shallow. Maybe part of that was the length constraint; maybe this one would have done better as a novel instead of a novella. It’s lacking something, for all that it’s clearly supposed to be very deep and poignant. Alas.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to reread the rest of the Tensorate books

I've liked books from this author before so i was enthusiastic to read it and it was interesting ! The struggle of Yeva so stay true to her duty when she's not insensible to the Queen was amazing and very nice to read. I had a bit of an issue getting emotionally invested because they felt unreachable to grasp but then overall it was still really good

What a beautiful read!

Neon Yang’s prose is absolutely beautiful and really made this story flow. I felt like they were leaning towards a classic myth/fairytale vibe with the writing style, and it really worked for this title!

Yeva’s story is a fun and quick adventure, while also exploring some deeper themes.

Thanks for the eARC.

If The Mandalorian was a sapphic romance with dragons set in an Asian-inspired world? SAY LESS.

Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame was everything I hoped for and more — the perfect blend of epic fantasy and swoon-worthy romance. As a lifelong Star Wars girlie (yes, I do own a life-size Boba Fett helmet), I was absolutely head over heels for this story.

Neon Yang crafts such an atmospheric world, beautifully layered with themes of disability, biracial identity, masking to survive societal expectations, and self-discovery. Every detail pulled me deeper into the story.

I also really appreciated that the romance wasn’t overly drawn out — it felt organic, natural, and perfectly paced for the novella format. This was truly a stunning journey from start to finish.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Sapphic Mandalorian-esque dragon slayer, need I say more?!

The pacing was a bit slow, but overall I really loved this.

Sapphic dragonslayer fantasy?! Sign me tf up!

I loved this in concept - a legendary masked dragonslayer sent into another kingdom to deal with the dragon rumors there, nevermind that dragons play a very different parts there culturally.

I have struggled with Neon Yang's narration style before - I remember trying and failing to read The Red Threads of Fortune multiple times before I found an audiobook version and finally read it that way. I got a digital ARC copy of Bright than Scale, Swifter than Flame, so I had to read it this way, though, and unfortunately I once again found that the author's style of narration just isn't for me. To me it feels like big chunks of the story are being told by an omnipresent, allknowing narrator (particularly the beginning and time jumps), which, for me, builds an emotional distance to the characters and causes me to not be as engaged.

For a novella about a dragonslayer, the plot was pretty slow at parts, and it took me much longer than it should have to read the first half of the story. It picked up in the second half, but when the plot really gets rolling, I wasn't a big fan of the character development/decisions. It just felt a bit overly convenient of the drama of the plot or to drive the drama overall, and was then amended/resolved in a way that also felt too aprubt/convenient. Of course, being a novella, this simply doesn't have the room for drawn out developments, but especially with how slow the beginning was, the ending felt a bit too rushed.
I didn't mind that the main mystery was predictable, but I also wanted a bit more for some plot points, and felt like some opportunities for nice connections and reveals were missed.

I also wanted a bit more from the romance subplot - this is not marketed as romantasy, so I get that there isn't a super big focus on it, but a few more active acknowledgements of the characters' romantic intentions and feelings could have been nice. This was another way in which I felt the narration was very emotionally disconnected and didn't do much to engage me.

My favourite part of the novella was how Yeva slowly warms up to and grows to appreciate the people and culture of the country she is sent to, to the point it feels like home. Also, the cover is amazing.

Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame is a lyrical and introspective novella about confronting the stories we’ve been taught to believe. Yeva, a dragon slayer from a land where dragons are feared, is sent to a kingdom where they’re revered—and must come to terms with a very different truth.

The writing has a mythic, folktale quality that suits the story’s tone, though it sometimes keeps the reader at a distance. I wasn’t especially invested in the romance, but Yeva’s personal journey was compelling. Her years of training as a dragon slayer are only briefly mentioned—while I don’t think the novella needed to explore them in detail, that part of her past could easily be grounds for a deeper story or companion piece.

The plot is a bit predictable and follows familiar beats, but the themes of cultural clash and personal reckoning are well-executed. A quiet, thoughtful read that will appeal to fans of poetic, character-driven fantasy.

The cover??? Spectacular.

This was actually so much more cozy journey of self discovery and romance than Mandalorian getting up to adventures and slaying dragons that I was expecting. I enjoyed it overall!

I actually wasn't looking forward to dragon slaying, I really appreciated how they were shown respect by some people, and teaching others to understand the same. It is both on the nose and metaphorical for labels and treatment that often get placed on certain groups of people. Watching Yeva's character grow from what they had been forced to harden themself into was really satisfying. Imagining what Yeva's life could have been "if only" tugged at my heartstrings, but we got there in the end. It was pretty predictable, but I didn't mind.

Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame is a lyrical novella that reads like a fairytale. We follow Yeva, a knight whose reputation is legendary. A dragon slayer who never takes off her armor, Yeva's reputation is the stuff of legend, the ever-present armor masking the girl she once was. When Yeva is tasked to go to a neighboring kingdom, one that is thought to be harboring a dragon, Yeva becomes entangled with the girl-King of the land. What was once a mission to kill a dragon becomes more complicated as Yeva grows closer to the monarch Lady Sookhee, and Yeva starts to wonder if the land's worship of dragons isn't as heretical as she was taught to believe.

This very much feels like a folktale, or a faiy tale in its presentation and story set up. Readers familiar with such tales may recognize the "twists" in this tale before Yeva, but the story isn't built to twist and turn, but to present a gorgeous story equal parts sapphic love story, of dragons and knights, and of reckoning with one's complex heritages and legacy. This was an enjoyable read!

I think i'm maybe just not the biggest fan of Neon Yang's writing, but I enjoyed the Mandalorian-core and the transness of it all.

2.5/5 stars.

this is a fantasy novella about yeva, a dragon slayer, assigned to another kingdom to discover the truth behind the rumors of dragons living in that area. we are told yeva's story from childhood to present day, how her past weaves with the events in the present, and are also given a sweet romance with the monarch of that kingdom.

overall, i really enjoyed the adventurous story however the author spent way too much time telling instead of showing. this resulted in 70% of the book being an info dump while the rest was bare minimum dialogue between characters. i never really felt the chemistry between yeva and sookhee as we're simply told exactly how they fall in love. the "twist" was predictable and the way it all worked out in the end way too easily felt like a complete waste since up until the last 20%, the book was gearing up towards something epic. a bit of a let down!