Thank you to the publishers, author and NetGalley for the free copy of this audio book.

This was a really fun read! Some decent world building and strong main characters. The narrator was perfect for this as well. Would definitely recommend giving this a try!

What a fun fantasy! I really enjoyed the world-building in this. I found myself immersed in a world where dragons plague people every day, and I loved it! The MC was great. I enjoyed her inner strength that really grew as the story progressed. She's a determined young lady, and I liked her! I would recommend this one for readers that enjoy YA fantasy!

ARC Review - Expected release May 31, 2022

This one took me a while to get into a few chapters in I was questioning moving forward but i’m glad that I did, as it was very enjoyable.

I listened to the audio version narrated by Ana Osorio, and she does a phenomenal job of using enough of the accent come through to immerse you in the culture without it being districting to single language individuals like myself. I applaud her work in this.

This book takes elements from medieval Spain and matador culture and adds fantasy elements in a beautifully seamless way, breathing life into her story.

The story centers on Zarela Zalvidar, who is picking up the pieces after dragons wreak havoc on her family’s 500th year anniversary as Dragonadors; Leaving death and death and destruction in their wake. With her father injured it’s up to her to face both the Dragon Guild and the public to rebuild her family’s name before they lose everything.

While she is a talented flamenco dancer, she is no Dragonador, and that is what she must become to save her family. The only problem is she has major PTSD after watching a dragon kill her mother. Enter the Dragon Trainer Arturo, who despises dragon fighting but may be her last chance. Out of money and out of time, there are still other threats she must face.

It loses a star for me from the world building, there was a lot of potential here and great concepts introduced but at the end fell somewhat sort with little explanation of how things worked. Such as wands that can magically turn into anything you need them to do, it’s alluded to them being costly and hard to produce but not really explored more and end up being deux de machina to move the plot at times.

I was also hoping for a little more interaction with the dragons, and some more descriptions given that multiple types are mentioned. We start to get some details when she started training but come on they are Dragons we are here for it give us the details.

These things don’t take too much away though because at the end of the day the fantasy analogues make for a cool aesthetic but the story itself is about a girl facing challenges to honor her family, and this delivers on that promise.

Big thanks to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for providing me with a chance to get in on this book early. I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I received an ARC of this through Netgalley and I'm sorry to say I had to DNF this at around 40%. I thought the premise of Dragonadors and flamenco dancers as entertainment would be interesting, but this was very hard to get through. There is very little mention of dragons at all, magic is mentioned but there's no real descriptions...instead the first 40% of the book tells us about the same old YA fantasy character who comes from money, is spoiled, and is "used to getting what she wants." The last part leads me to the real reason I wouldn't recommend this to my library/teen readers: a lot of time in the beginning of the book is spent showing the MC refusing to take no for an answer when she propositions a young man with work. He says no repeatedly and she essentially stalks and harasses him, forcing him to compromise his beliefs and say yes eventually because she will not leave him alone. I think it's incredibly harmful to show this type of behavior as acceptable in a MC that then goes on to fall in love with the person they essentially coerced into a job. I was disappointed that it turned out like this and I hate to give a bad review but it put such a bad taste in my mouth and eventually ruined the rest of what the book could be for me.

This book had a unique concept but it dint draw me in. There are good ideas in this book, but I feel that they were not really explored and developed. The characters are okay, but they lacked depth and the romance was very typical. I did like the fantasy Spanish setting and how the book mixed exsisting culture into the world.

I really enjoyed this book! It was so lovely to see the mix of Spanish influence with magic and dragons! I really loved the growth that both Arturo and Zarela both showed through the book. The slight hint of romance was very sweet and I felt it was the perfect amount to allow the story to shine more so than this new OTP I have.

This was such a fantastic story. Inspired by medieval Spain, it is set in the magical world of Hispalia where people and dragons live in constant conflict.

Zarela Zalvidar is smart, brave, and talented, but she lives in the shadow of her parents. Her mother is a legendary flamenco dancer and her father is the most famous Dragonador (think matador, but for dragons) in all of Hispalia. She has studied her mother's performances and listened to her father's stories of dragon fighting all her life. When a devastating accident threatens to destroy her family's legacy and livelihood, Zarela has to find a way to save everything.

The story is exciting, magical, and captivating. Ibañez's writing is stunning and her blend of Spanish and English help to really bring the world alive.

Ana Osorio narrates the audiobook. She provides a wonderful voice to the story that really captures the vibrancy of Ibañez's world and characters. It really made for a fascinating listen.

If you're into realistic heroines, action, dragons, and a bit of an enemies to lovers thing set Ina beautiful world, definitely check this one out.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and Net Galley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest opinion.

I enjoyed this book. The setting was beautifully described and I could picture my self in Zarela's world, the sights, sounds, and smells. I loved the dancing, the dragon aspect, especially the change in the end with the dragons in the arena (don't want to give it away). I loved the fierceness and determination of Zarela. I enjoyed the enemies to lovers trope. I will recommend this book to my students and purchase it for the library.
I liked the narrator. I think she did a fabulous job.

At first, I struggled with this because the concept of animal cruelty reminded me too much of the brutality of the real bull fights of Spain. I enjoyed the blend of culture and its history within the story, and I loved the twist on the tradition. Featuring an enemies to lover SLOW BURN trope was a nice touch, but the story is actually more focused on Zarela’s coming of age which is still enjoyable despite her many whiny moments.

Zarela, the daughter of a flamenco dancer and dragonador, wants nothing more than to follow in her very successful parents' footsteps. This dream is dashed when calamity strikes and she has to pick up the pieces left to her to save her family's way of life. Part of her plan involves recruiting the prickly Artura Diaz de Montserrat who is both a help and source of frustration. While I did not like elements of the way romance developed, overall I thought this book was a very compelling read. Zarela is a character that readers can connect with and the story itself moved along at a great pace. Listening to the narrator gave a depth to the read that I wouldn't have gotten just in my head. She seamlessly integrated the Spanish words into the narrative in a way that added in that little bit of culture that otherwise would have been missing. I highly recommend this book/audiobook!

I'M IN LOVE. Probably with Arturo. But definitely with this story.

I read Ibanez's debut novel and she has grown so much as an author. Together We Burn is a lush and complex story that weaves the magic of dragon taming with a cast of characters I quickly fell in love with. I really believe a Disney movie could be made out of this book and then all little girls would want to be Zarela when they grow up. Let's get into the review.

Plot: I adore the story and the mystery surrounding everything. I had a hard time with the pacing at the beginning because we spent so much time that first day and then I wasn't sure how much time was passing during training and so forth. The pacing was a problem, but not enough to disturb my enjoyment of the book. I did see that final twist coming about halfway through the story, but it didn't change my enjoyment when it happened. I'm not sure any of the surprises were surprising, but they were utterly delightful. Characters behaved like I wanted them to and it makes me think Isabel Ibanez and I would be BFFs.

World-Building: I liked how both the system of magic and the history of the Dragonadors are presented early and then small, additional information is given throughout the story - that I how I personally like to read about a new world. The scenery descriptions were perfection - I feel like I can see their house, the arena, the city, the ranch, even the dumb cave in my mind. I don't know if this story is original or based in Spanish folklore, but Ibanez's stories are so good at presenting me a story I'm unfamiliar with and making me feel like I've known it forever.

Characters: Let's be honest, this is where this book shines and where I fell in LOVE with the story. Zarela is amazing. She is brave and honest and endearing. Her emotions are real and I love how she knows she is being ridiculous, but goes with it anyway. I loved her from the beginning. She doesn't need a savior, but I adore the saving that Arturo does. He is definitely book-boyfriend material and broods with the best of them. The secondary characters shine with unique personalities and I want my own dynamic Lola in my life. I know I said it already, but the characters do what I would want them to do and it makes for a delightful reading experience.

I'll leave with this final word of advice: never trust a potted plant.

Oh, and preorder this, since it won't be released until the end of May and I need to talk to someone about it!!

Note on my star rating system:

* DNF or really loathed
** Didn't enjoy or there were major issues with the story
*** Average read - most books I read are three-star books. They are good stories I recommend, but they didn't change my life.
**** - Amazing. Seriously. AMAZING. I've already been recommending it. I'm already adding the author's other books to my TBR. I am having a hard time starting a new book because it was so good I can't stop living in the story just yet.
***** - Life changing. Everything a four-star book is, but MORE. I'm already planning a re-read. I've bought it in a second format. I'm comparing the characters I love to other characters I love. I'm in love with the story. I'm referencing it in my daily life.

This book was super interesting. I was pulled in pretty quickly, but it was kind of slow moving in the middle and didn't really capture me. The ending was really exciting and well done though. It really didn't happen how I expected and I was very captivated.
We spend the beginning of the book with Zarela trying to figure out who let their family's dragons free. Her dad is a dragon fighter and he is badly injured in the escape. She has to figure out if this was on purpose and if so, who did it. She needs to figure out how to scrape by with her father trying to recover and their income of dragon fighting gone.
I liked Zarela, she was fiesty and brave, even when she wasn't sure she could be. I also liked her friend Lola. I liked dragon trainer Arturo ok, he was kind of an oddball character for me. I thought the chemistry between him and Zarela was a little bit forced and it wasn't my favorite.
Like I said, the ending was what really had me hooked. We learn about secrets and betrayal and new beginnings.
Overall, this was a fun book with a unique concept that I will definitely be recommending!

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this book. While it has a really interesting concept, I think it suffers from pacing and focus issues that couldn’t quite lift it completely off the ground into loving or even liking it too much.

This is a fantasy novel based around Spanish bull fighting culture if the bulls were instead: dragons! Our main character is the daughter of a famous flamenco dancer and draganador - a man who fights dragons in the ring. After a disaster at her family’s arena, Zarela is left scrambling to save her family business and keep their livelihood while facing protests and someone intent on seeing them fail.

Pretty cool idea! But I think they just didn’t focus on what I would have focused on to make it more interesting to me. First, because if you already have fully formed ideas about the brutality of bull fighting you aren’t going to be *that* sympathetic to our main character and her family. In fact, I was pretty against them for most of the story and that did not really change until near the end. There are mentions that the dragons are destructive but there is no overlooking the cruelty of slowly killing them in front of an audience. While the book addresses this, and has a main character and love interest who is against the practice, its still what we are dealing with and heading towards for most of the story and makes it very uncomfortable.

I think if they had done the reveal for their new performance earlier in the story it would have been much more interesting and an easier to swallow story and character arc to cheer for. As it was, I wasn’t cheering for our main character to ‘win’ the story at all.

A huge focus of the story is the love interest, Arturo, who Zarela hires as a dragon tamer but who is deeply against dragon fighting but is apparently forced to work in the industry for reasons. The amount of red flags this man has is enough to use as the cape in a bullfight. However, they still have really good chemistry and while I would be like ‘girl, no’ in real life, I still kind of liked it in fiction. If the romance doesn’t work for you at all though, you would be in for a hard time as it focuses pretty heavily on it.

I also understand this is a YA book but it seemed to fluctuate between New Adult focusing older, with sexual content and violence to Teen, focusing younger with some of the ideas that should be flushed out just not. Like the ending is such a magic wand waving Disney ending solution when it was clearly set up as not really working out that way in context. I am no longer a young adult, though I still find the diversity and inclusion in most YA fantasy stories a great reason to still jump into the genre. But I have read YA that don’t have me questioning if this is how people would really react in certain scenarios.

I think this book was trying very hard not to be…How to Train Your Dragon in Spain. But I think that would have been way better. This is basically that but instead of from Hiccup’s perspective we are watching from America Ferrara’s character (Ingrid? I don’t remember) as she continues to just train to murder a dragon. We don’t want her to murder a dragon so why do we care about the plot?

There are interesting conversations about cruelty vs culture. I just think we got to the moral high ground way too late in the story.

Overall, I would say its a pretty interesting idea but faltered a bit in making it a compelling story that you can actually cheer for.

Thank you Netgalley for the advance audiobook and reader copy of Together We Burn by Isabel Ibanez in exchange for an honest review. I received both and ended up just listening to the book and we just post same review for both. I requested this book because it has dragons in it and I loved the premise of the story. There was beautiful imagery and storyline, but my life kind of exploded as I tried to read this, making it very difficult. I am going to try again in the future when I can better appreciate it.

This book was fantastic! 18 year old Zarela comes from an extremely talented family of flamenco dancers and Dragonadors. When tragedy hits Zerela's home she has to figure out way to save her family's legacy and draftee the Dragon Guild.
I loved the world building in this book. It was really interesting and felt fresh. I also liked the grumpy dragon hunter. I listened to this as an audiobook and the narrator was terrific.

Together we Burn is a gorgeous book. I loved the inclusion od Spanish language with contextual hints for English speakers. The setting--medieval Spain-- was refreshing, as I don't read many books from that era and region. I particularly enjoyed the main character's love for and commitment to her family and her courage was inspiring. From the beginning, some plot points are knowable, but the journey was engrossing. I would happily recommend this book.

I had to sit down with this review for a while because I wanted to be as fair as possible, so here are the things I enjoyed about this book:
First and foremost I love reading a Latinx author being Latinx myself. I also loved that it was based in Spain and was so culturally rich. Another thing I loved was dragons! And a love interest that shared my same ideals.

What I didn’t like however was that basing the story in Spain the author decided to include bull fighting as “dragon fighting” and glorifying a barbaric tradition along the way when many places in the world are still fighting to end such cruel practices. The way the dragon fighting is described is exactly as you would do it for bull fighting (skimmed of course) and it made me sick to my stomach.
The author tried to make us side with the humans in the name of dragons being wild dangerous creatures and dragon fighting being an art from and a tradition, going as far as to try to make the protestors of this practices the bad ones, and not once the main character wonders why the dragons behave that way (spoiler alert the humans started the war with dragons and they retaliated), and she does her best to try to keep her dragon fighting arena open.
This brings me to the main character: I just couldn’t like her, she tried to live in her parents shadows while excusing every single thing they ever did, and it just bugged me. I did appreciate that she didn’t sit down to cry and instead took matters into her own hands so there’s that, but she was also incapable of admitting her fathers and even her own faults in what happened during their show and blamed basically everyone else in the book, so the lack of accountability really annoyed me.

Now a little bit of spoilers but it’s important to make a full review: the author is aware of the objectionable practice “dragon” fighting is, hence protestors and a love interest who refuses to kill dragons even though he’s a dragon hunter (still not great, but in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king I guess) and she does fix this somewhat at the end, with the main character changing the whole show and the epilogue showing a more humane relationship with dragons moving forward, but sadly this didn’t happen until I reached 96% of the book and feeling sick to my stomach for 96% of the book prevents me from giving a better rating, which is unfortunate because the author had a fun original idea that if it had focused more on the morality of their actions and not in keeping traditions alive she could have not only have a fun story but a commentary on animal cruelty.

This is How to Train Your Dragon with a strong female main character set in a Spanish/Hispanic inspired world. That being said, it's a great cure if your suffering from How to Train Your Dragon and/or Encanto withdrawals. Not to mention it has a swoon-worthy slow-burn romance (I would die for Arturo... I can't help but imagine how good he looks in those tight Matador costumes)!

Mix How to Train Your Dragon (the movie version) with Spanish bullfighting and sprinkle in a bit of soap opera, and voila! you have Together We Burn.
Brilliant concept! Sounds magical and dangerous and exciting!
Unfortunately I liked the synopsis more than the rest of the story. It wasn’t bad; it just didn’t work for me.
The main character Zarela is a brave, fierce, and determined young woman who is willing to take on any challenge for her family. I think I would have enjoyed her more were it not for an early scene with her stalking another character to pressure him into violating his values and doing what she wants instead. That’s not admirable stubbornness, it’s harassment. Despite allegedly being desperate, Zarela never loses her sense of entitlement and privilege.
I struggled with the easy acceptance of dragon fighting throughout the story. I understood Zarela’s position on dragon fighting, but I can’t agree with upholding a practice for tradition’s sake. I think capturing and crippling animals before forcing them into an arena to be antagonized and killed for entertainment is awful. If the animals are wiping out villages and killing people, there are humane ways to control the population.
The story and characters were given surface treatment and were, to my annoyance, often inconsistent. Why would someone who claims to have strong principles abruptly agree to be involved in something that violates those beliefs? The enemies to lovers development happened instantaneously – one moment the characters hate one another, and only a few pages later they’re thinking about kissing without any relationship building in between. On top of that, it felt like a one-sided romance. Zarela enjoys the attention and the power of Arturo wanting her, but doesn’t show signs of actually liking him.
There are things I enjoyed about this book. The magic is underexplored and used primarily as a convenient tool, but it felt unique and interesting. I would have loved more focus on the flamenco dancing, which was Zarela’s passion and my favorite part. I could picture the sort of world where this story was set, rich and interesting. The worldbuilding was fairly limited, but the concepts were solid. Between dragons, dancing, and romance, I expect this book will be an immediate hit for its young adult audience!

Thank you Netgalley and Macmillan audio for the opportunity to listen to this title before publishing!

I will start by saying that I was definitely interested in this story. I enjoy the premise, and flamenco dancers + magic + dragons is an AWESOME idea. However, I got to about 50% of the audiobook and I found that I can’t tolerate the narrator.

I feel that this narrator says every sentence with the same inflection, even when a sentence is described as being said “sharply” or “defensively” or some other describing word. I find it all to be overly passive and unbelievable and it has taken me so far out of the story that I won’t be finishing it in it’s entirety. I hope to pick up this title in the future and read it in physical form instead.