"Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travellers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that's not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he's still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we're grateful, but not that grateful.”
Oh my goodness, this was one of my top two books for 2020! It’s an epic fantasy story that revolves around village girls being sacrificed to the all-powerful (human) Dragon, and what happens when one girl refuses to play by his rules. It has old-world dark magic, a fierce heroine, and though it has its roots in myths and folklore, it is a wildly imaginative original story (Naomi’s Spinning Silver is a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin). I absolutely loved it, and even though there was a satisfying ending, I was deeply disappointed it wasn’t a series.
— Brea