Among the Burning Flowers
ISBN: 9781526685254
Description
Marosa Vetalda is a prisoner in her own home, controlled by her cold father, King Sigoso. Over the mountains, her betrothed, Aubrecht Lievelyn, rules Mentendon in all but name. Together, they intend to usher in a better world. A better world seems impossibly distant to Estina Melaugo, who hunts the Draconic beasts that have slept across the world for centuries. And now the great wyrm Fýredel is stirring, and Yscalin will be the first to fall.
Reviewed on 17th January 2026
This prequel to the first book in the series gives some extra background to how the situation at the start came about. This confusingly makes it chronologically the middle book of the series, but as far as I can tell they can be read in any order and still work.
However my memory of the first book, after just two years, is too hazy to really understand all the context and how it fits in - whether there are overlapping characters or settings, or whether it's just serving to set the scene for the world.
As a standalone, I think it struggles a bit. Part of the beauty of the main books of the series is the depth and the detail and the amount of slow steady worldbuilding that can happen, and deep relationships that the reader can develop with the characters over the course of a thousand pages. This skips all that and feels shallow by comparison.
This book is split into two halves called Before and After. Which makes sense from the perspective of most of the plot. But one thread only appears in the Before half and isn't followed up on in the After, which felt very weird and like a forgotten or pointless bit of plot. Perhaps had I better memory of the original novel it would fit more comfortably, but as I read it came across as a mistake.
Ultimately I suppose I'm mostly disapointed that this wasn't a big main book in the series, and didn't deliver the level of enjoyment I was hoping for.
