I thought this was very good and I will have to add this to the shop shelves. Thank you for the chance for us to review.

This is a short, powerful fantasy story about Yeva, a masked dragon slayer sent to spy on a foreign queen. But the mission gets complicated when she starts to question her duty—and her own identity. Set in an Asian-inspired world, the book mixes action, romance, and deep themes like colonization, gender, and culture.

The worldbuilding is beautiful, with lots of small, rich details (like tea, politics, and rice porridge!). Yeva is a strong, queer, disabled main character, and her journey feels emotional and meaningful. While the ending comes a little fast and the twist is easy to guess, the story is still satisfying.

This is a great read for fantasy fans who like dragons, lady knights, sapphic romance, and stories about finding where you belong. It’s short but leaves a strong impression.

after a tragedy hit yeva’s home, they were sent away to their uncle’s guild, to fulfill their destiny to become a legendary dragon slayer, who will never be able to show their face! but our story really starts when yeva is on a mission to investigate queen sookhee and find out secrets about dragons at any and all costs! but obviously the mission does not go as planned, romance ensues, and yeva starts questioning the expectations of their father’s people, while also having questions about where their mother came from.

i love the conversations around the fluidity of gender, i love the discussions on biracial identity and colonization that you can very much be born into, and i loved the themes of masks and how we all wear them at times. and i just really loved seeing a queer disabled mandalorian doing cool things and falling in love, and i really hope that we get more stories to follow.

lastly, i really do believe that your culture's rice porridge does in fact have magical healing properties! (arroz caldo, i love you)

trigger + content warnings: death, dragon death, talk of colonization, blood, parental abuse (off page), talk of a blood disease, loss of parents in past, grief

What a delightful novella! So efficient in its storytelling! LOVED the writing -- the plot was quite predictable, and yet I found myself on the edge of my seat several times during the read. And the prose was delightful and gentle and oh so good! So glad I read it!

I had high hopes for this story. It promised everything I love: a strong lady knight, dragons, mythology, fantasy novella, sapphic romance. Unfortunately, it did just not engage me in any capacity. It took me almost 4 months to finish even though it's less than 200 pages. I liked the writer's voice but the plot just felt so mundane and like a story I've read 100 times before. I needed the characters and their relationship to be much more fleshed out.

I guessed how it would end by chapter two and lost all interest. Good ideas, just poorly executed.

Thank you to Tor and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I enjoyed the writing style this novella had, but i found the story to be bland. The relationship between the two characters was underdeveloped, and the whole story was very predictable.

Thanks to NetGalley & Tor Publishing Group for the early copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was a fun story, though I think I would have liked it more if the protagonist weren't as dumb as a pile of rocks.

Don't get me wrong, it was entertaining from beginning to end, but I feel like everything was pretty obvious in its development and world-building. It's just very flat and predictable. The amount of telling and not showing didn't help either. Still, an interesting read.

Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame is a beautiful Asian-inspired, Sapphic, lady-knight novella with dragons, secrets, and a self-discovering love story. The beginning of the story kind of reminded me of The Poppy war with the military school and the young kids away from home. This story is well written, and a quick read. I was able to tell how things were going to turn out pretty early on, but it didn’t bother me so much.
If you like Asian-inspired stories with strong female leads, this is one for you. Overall, I liked it!

LADY KNIGHT YEAR CONTINUES

A beautifully told novella, as predictable as fairytale and just as compelling - gorgeously descriptive prose that tells the story of a girl-knight and a girl-king, both trapped in their roles and yearning for something more; a story of secrets and how they are both a prison and a safety, and where those lines blur.

Yeva is a dragon-knight, blessed with a holy power, but damaged from her wounds. An outsider due to her sex and to her heritage, she is nonetheless sent as envoy to a strange court in the land where her mother was young, where she must act as both threat and guardian to the woman who rules. But as she finds greater acceptance within the court, can she truly lay down her armour and her sword without becoming less than what she is?

It is a story of courage and of cowardice, a story about the stories men tell, of the love between women, and of the search for freedom. I loved it.

Thank you to Samantha at Tor who provided me with an Arc copy through NetGalley.

Yang's work has been on my tbr for years now, and there's nothing like a novella featuring dragons to get my interest more easily attracted.

I can be pretty hit/miss with prose that sometimes carries a lot of world/character building in a few short sentences, but Yang’s work was easy enough for me to pick up on all they giving.

Yeva is such an interesting character to follow, and I loved their journey. From choosing to close themselves off from nearly everyone by wearing their armor as more than just a physical shield, to learning to shed that armor in Quanbao, to become known as more than just a soldier to themselves and the public.

This was a very enjoyable read and I highly recommend it.

✨ Review ✨ Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame by Neon Yang, Narrated by Nancy Wu

Thanks to Tor, Recorded Books, and #netgalley for the gifted advanced copy/ies of this book!

Yeva is the masked guildknight, one of the legendary dragon hunters in the kingdom. As part of her identity, she must never remove her armor in public, and she's been living live this for years.

Now, she sets off for Quanbao, a remote kingdom, where she's sent to investigate rumors of a dragon. She befriends the leader of the kingdom, Lady Sookhee, and comes to respect her and appreciate her company. As she explores the kingdom, what will she find, and where do her loyalties lie?

This was a fun fantasy novella with great worldbuilding that fit within its short space constraints. While I'd have loved a bit more character building, it worked for a novella and I was invested in the story. I really enjoyed this one!

🎧 This was one that I had to read a bit on the page to get situated before I could listen on audio. Once I felt settled into the story and setting, the audio was great!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️(4.25+)
Genre: fantasy novella
Setting: fantasy world
Length: 4 hours, 54 minutes
Reminds me of: The Mandalorian meets Freya Marske
Pub Date: May 6, 2025

Read this if you like:
⭕️ The Mandalorian
⭕️ Queer fantasy
⭕️ Dragons
⭕️ Novellas

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for the ARC.

I really enjoyed this, its exactly what I wanted it to be. I liked how the framing served to expand on a myth in this fantasy world, giving a bit more detail but maintaining an air of mystery by its nature. The big reveal wasn't a surprise by any means, but that's not a bad thing; the blurb implies lesbians and dragons, and it delivered. It doesn't ruin the real question, which is what Yeva would do with the reveal, and I couldn't tell which way she'd fall until the very end.

Oh I loved this. Yeva is a guildknight, loyal to the kingdom of Mithrandon and forced to conceal her face and what sets her apart. When political interests land her a station in Quanbao, her mother's home country, she must learn how to find her place there without forgetting her duty to slay the dragon that supposedly threatens them.

This had sapphic knights, themes of colonialism, and accepting your own otherness. I can't recommend it enough.

Great novella, short and to the point. Everything in this story is face paced. You are instantly thrown into the world of dragon slaying and mysterious kingdoms. The reveal is pretty predictable but that took away nothing from the story.

Cannot properly review this book as Netgalley has made it difficult to review anything. This is an accessibility issue now going from ASCM to LCPL.

This is an epic fantasy novella, but the story felt very cozy in scale. It follows a masked knight who is sent to the neighboring kingdom to find evidence of dragons. She finds something much more valuable instead. It’s a story about reconnecting with your roots, growing comfortable with shedding your shell (or armor), and learning how to love.

I just wish the story was longer. There’s so much depth to the world, but the story itself is told in a summary in a way that feels similar to novellas by Nghi Vo. I think people who like Nghi Vo’s work will enjoy this book.

I was both excited and nervous going into this book. Excited because it felt like it was made for me; lesbian fantasy with dragons inspired by The Mandalorian and written by one of my all-time favorite authors??? Yes, please! But I was just as nervous because what if I hyped it up too much?
Well, I definitely enjoyed this, so I thankfully avoided the latter.
This is more of a slow fantasy novella, with famed dragon hunter Yeva exploring parts of herself she thought she’d left behind in order to become a dragon hunter. Yeva is sent to a rival kingdom as an envoy to see if the rumors that the kingdom is hiding a dragon is true.
I really enjoyed following Yeva as a character. For years, for her own reasons, she has remained faceless, wearing her helmet as both physical and emotional armor. While she has their air of mystery to all the other characters, we the readers are able to see her thoughts and just how she does not have everything together.
Parts of the book moved a bit too quick for me, but I could also see how it lent itself to its brevity; it’s not trying to be an epic quest and long-winded romance.
I gave this book 3.5 stars. I would definitely recommend this to certain fans of The Mandalorian (if you like slower pieces thinking about the person behind the helmet).

Everyone wears masks, metaphorically speaking. We show different versions of ourselves to different people. And conversely, we shield off other parts, for better or worse, depending on who we’re with, what surrounds us, or how much we’ve explored, and embraced who we fundamentally are.

Neon Yang makes those masks literal for the protagonist in their latest novella, Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame. Kunlin Yeva has become the notorious guildknight from Mithrandon, a dragon-slayer with no equal in the Sun Empire, who never takes off their armor, including the helm on their head.

This masked guildknight is a symbol, a fearsome living myth much more—and much less—than a person. Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame, however, gives us a tender examination of Yeva and who she is (and was before her time at Mithrandon).

[rest on webiste]

The cover -- obsessed. At first glance, I was expecting an epic/high fantasy story and was grateful that someone informed me it was a cozy fantasy novella.

The prose is beautiful. I loved the theme of finding the sense of belonging, reconnecting with the main character's mother's story, and dismantling what they were told to believe. I would have loved this novella to have a full story because I was invested in the character's background, their journey, and would have wanted the relationship to be flushed out more.

The twist in the end was predictable and that aside I enjoyed the novella.

at face value, this book really seemed like it would be for me. dragon slayers, lady knights, sapphic romance--these are all things that make a story exciting to me. unfortunately i felt like this one fell flat. my biggest issue was the way the narrative was told (third person present tense)--it felt like a fairytale or a story told around a campfire instead of an immersive experience in which we actually have the ability to get to know the characters. for this reason, most of it felt pretty surface level. i felt like i was being told what was happening instead of being shown, which really took me out of it. i think this can be a really fun way to while a prologue to introduce the main plot line/lore, but for an entire 200 page novella, it was complete overkill and took me out of the story.

i think this could be a great pallet cleaner for the right reader being as it is so short, however it was not for me.