This book took me entirely by surprise. A nuanced yet powerful discussion on colonialism and occupation, the book also provides a new take on dragons and is a quick and exciting read. It reminded me a little of The Unbroken and also somewhat of A Memory Called Empire.

I devoured this book. The prose is so engaging in that it was highly descriptive and moved at a great pace, yet took the time to slow down and include lyrical, elegant language, often in descriptions of emotions or the landscape.

The world-building is rich for a novella. Not only do we have the concept of the occupation and why, but hints as to the outer setup of the world (it’s by no way implying this is the lone occupied land) are given. We also have the dragons, which are magical beings that the Ba’Suon can link with telepathically yet don’t try to control. The dragons are somewhere between an animal and sentient and act a bit like horses and dogs. The Ba’suon also have the ability to telepathically link with their fellow Ba’suons and are able to read their emotions and other things about them. These aspects of the world building tie into the story, so nothing feels over-explained or needlessly included.

I wanted more of this story when it was done! In a good way, though, not a “I feel like I’m missing something”. I don’t think we’re meant to get more to the story in this volume because it’s not something that can be wrapped up easily. One person can’t end a regime, just as one person can’t carry one out.

In terms of the characters, I really liked how Meka was not some girl on her first mission. She’s mature, knows what she’s doing, and is entirely confident in her abilities, yet she’s not arrogant. While everyone seems enamoured by these fierce, openly angry young women in books today (I mean, fair), a woman who is fierce and angry yet keeps it contained and boiling under the surface is more interesting to me because that sort of character is harder to convey. Her strength and resolve are shown in the things she doesn’t do, the passive, rigid resistance she espouses by her actions. She complies when needed but isn’t afraid to renege on promises she made to someone she doesn’t respect. She also has a light, soft side that rounded her out. She’s not the most gregarious or even interesting of characters in terms of backstory, but she bears a weight that carries the story through.

I also really liked the other two characters, Lilley and Raka. One is openly likable and brings in a bit of fun to the story (after his initial introduction), and Raka is mysterious and taciturn. The more we learn about these men, the more we grow to like them, despite their initial rough presentation. There is also a complex relationship that forms between the three of them, something I won’t spoil, but which felt mature and natural and I really liked it.

The story itself is very simple. Meka is trying to bring a dragon back to her people to prevent fighting between males and to help populate the dragons in a different region. It's something her people have done for centuries, much like controlled burning. There is a very subtle environmentalism thread running through this novel, as well as the direct attack on unjust war.

The three characters together represent sides of colonialism we often see in media: the colonized person fighting back, a person from the colonizing force who has grown to appreciate the other culture and, in a sense, finds more community with them than their own people, and the colonized person who is complacent, or perhaps complicit in their own people’s subjugation. As much as I just characterized them, this is only how they appear at the start - the novel shows how these perspectives are varied, complex, and can’t be boiled down into simple designations. This book reminds us that not only is colonialism and occupation of lands - whether by force or more subtle means - always destructive, people aren’t all bad, and making connections and understanding and respecting one another is how we can break these mentalities. And, also, that fighting back is sometimes the only option.

Now, that being said, that’s just what I read in the story. You can go into this thing reading it entirely at face value and finding it utterly entertaining, but I would argue this book carries with it a deeper purpose that is poignant and relevant to today.

If you couldn’t tell, I loved this book. I thought it was fantastic.

I would have liked this to be a little longer. I liked the unique setting (it's giving wild west gold rush boomtown town vibes), Meka and Lilley, the dragons (dragon riders have been done many times, and I appreciate that it a slightly different take), the anticolonialism, etc. I would have liked all those things to be more fleshed out. I would have liked more of the Ba'suon and their camp and their culture and ways too.

If you've been seeing a lot of dragonriding books lately but wishing they were a little more speculative fantasy than romantasy, you'll want to check this out.

Meka is part of the Bo'Suon people, nomads who prioritize living in balance with the natural world - and dragonriders. They manage the wild herds of suon (dragons!!!), and are able to communicate with them. When their island was invaded, they chose not to go to war, which is out of balance, but rather to try to maintain their traditional ways even as they were displaced. Meka is back on the island of her birth to "gather" a male dragon. But the new administrative rulers of her ancestral lands love needless bureaucracy as much as the next imperial overlords, and they decide to make things as difficult for her as they can...

This novella has a good mix of action and philosophy, as Meka makes friends, enemies, and reluctant allies while on her quest. I heard echoes of The Word for World Is Forest in Meka and Raka's struggle to do the right thing by their ancestors while also resisting their colonizers' fundamental misunderstanding of their culture. I was less convinced by the inclusion of Lilley, a former soldier who fell in love with a Bo-Suon and now feels an affinity with dragons. But, this is a novella, and I am looking forward to seeing what Lowachee does with the relationships in the next book!

This objective review is based on a complimentary copy of the novella.

Highlights
~dragon cubs!
~don’t touch the swords
~maintaining eco-balance
~unexpected queerness
~the cosmos is definitely listening

I’ve been hearing Lowachee’s name for a long time, but never managed to read any of her books until Mountain Crown showed up on Netgalley. I figured a relatively short book + dragons would be a good introduction for an author I hadn’t tried before.

SUFFICE TO SAY, AFTER THIS NOVELLA I WILL BE DEVOURING LOWACHEE’S ENTIRE BACKLIST!

The plot is pretty well covered by the blurb, so I won’t go over that much, but the WORLD! Please picture me swooning. Lowachee wastes no time establishing her setting; the sense-of-place is so strong and clear, and rings unique, like not quite like anything I’ve seen before. Mostly in terms of the Ba’suon, the people Méka, our MC, belongs to: we learn about Méka’s – let’s call it psychic empathy, for lack of a better term – on the very first page, and it’s rapidly confirmed that this is an ability all Ba’suon have. It’s absolutely fascinating to see how this is clearly Méka’s primary sense – think of how humans are intensely visual creatures, and now imagine all that weight placed on a kind of psychic ability. Lowachee’s worldbuilding is phenomenal on every level, but I especially loved how this one detail – the Ba’suon’s empathy – informs and influences absolutely everything about Méka and her culture.

His energetic presence was a hollow clang to her, an empty bucket struck by the hammer of the cosmos.

But in a way, Méka’s empathy – magic? – is almost defined by absence, in Mountain Crown. Because non-Ba’suon don’t have this ability, and weirder and worse is the way that they feel dead to this sense. Ba’suon can sense each other, and animals and birds and so on…but not humans who are not Ba’suon. This is a direct reversal from the other times I’ve seen fictional cultures with this kind of magic – think the Lakewalkers from Bujold’s Sharing Knife quartet, where non-Lakewalkers don’t have this magic, but Lakewalkers can still see/sense them just fine. So I wonder what it was like, when the Ba’suon encountered other peoples for the first time? Like the Kattakans – imagine being invaded by people who look human, but ‘register’ as completely dead? That must have been horrifying, and it says a lot about the Ba’suon that they haven’t demonised outsiders because of that. It would have been very believable for a people in that situation to become intensely xenophobic…but they’re not.

(I mean, they’re not pro-Kattakan, with really good reason. But there’s no sense of only Ba’suon people are real people, you know?)

That’s important. What we can infer about the Ba’suon from that…almost, I think, gives us the heart of who they are. What defines them as a people.

That, and the dragons, of course. Which the Ba’suon call suon (and the way I flailed when I realised the Ba’suon named themselves after dragons! Or named the dragons after themselves! Again, tiny details which imply SO MUCH!)

larger adults flit back and forth like jeweled bats upon stalactites.

The characters are amazing. I loved Méka; I loved getting to know her, learning who she was. She’s so different from most of the main characters I see; practical but unyielding on the things that matter to her, with a pride that almost doesn’t seem like pride, compassionate without necessarily being forgiving, an unfamiliar kind of optimistic. Her…reverence is almost the right word, but not quite…for the natural world is a beautiful thing to witness, to be inside of for a while. She has a very non-individualistic outlook and attitude that is – pretty foreign to Western culture, really!

I don’t mean to suggest that she’s some perfect Enlightened being: far from it! In her POV the Kattakans are an ‘infestation’, and while she doesn’t offer violence to insults, she definitely invites idiots to Fuck Around And Find Out, with a mien of such steady, implacable surety in her ability to wipe the floor with anyone who tangles with her, that I had to go find a fan.


The two major secondary characters – Lilley, a disabled Kattakan Méka rescues from slavery, and Raka, a Ba’suon with that all-important empathy closed-off – are also fantastic. Just Lilley’s name helps drive home that we are Not Anywhere Familiar (‘Lily’ as a man’s name is not something you generally come across in the English-speaking world!), and both Lilley and Raka’s backstories have the same effect, giving us a glimpse into a history that feels subtly alien (mostly in its approach to queer love and fantasy gender roles). The two characters added a lot to the book; it would have been wildly different, and lesser, without them.

The dawn eked from the night in silver and rose with the sun pinned like a brooch on the hilly breast of the eastern horizon.

Lowachee manages to very quickly convey the ‘sense’ of the world she’s created in the opening pages, while still having plenty of surprises for you tucked into the worldbuilding. The tiniest details are hidden gems, and each one impressed me more than the last, had me falling more and more with this world – and mourning it, because Mountain Crown is set in the (not immediate) aftermath of a war that drove most of the Ba’suon, Méka’s people, from their homeland. We don’t get to see it unmarred, and the contrast between Méka’s inner reality and her outer one – her sense of self, her memories, and what the Kattakans have made of her home – is enraging and heartbreaking. There’s a streak of…not exactly environmentalism…that’s fundamental to the Ba’suon and also the plot, in that it drives the entire ‘rite’ that is Méka coming to collect a dragon/suon; and it hurts, because we see how connected the Ba’suon are to the natural world, and I can’t help wondering how different our world would be if we had the same kind of empathy/sensing-of-life that they do.

It’s things like calling baby dragons ‘cubs’ that reinforces, over and over, that we are Somewhere Else, that this isn’t our world, that the cultures we see are radically different from our own in some pretty intrinsic ways. I’ve never seen anyone call baby dragons cubs before! It’s a quick, easy way to divorce us from the genre expectations we bring with us from book to book, a way to bypass our thinking minds and get us right in the guts with the fact that we’re not in Kansas anymore. I realise I keep making this point, but it’s because I just can’t get over how effectively it’s done, and how efficiently! And how this alien-ness, this unfamiliarity, allows Lowachee to…take a not-quite-standard approach to the storytelling. Present us with some concepts and ideas that we don’t see that often, that challenge some of The Way Things Are in SFF. The approach to forgiveness; the strangely fluid pride; the resistance to violence which is not pacifism.

that fear and suspicion imbalanced the world into chaos, and they couldn’t be ignored or controlled by avoidance. That even the ones who betrayed you in love deserved a reckoning with love.

It delights me, and I hope we see more of that in the next book. Which, yes, I’m going straight off to pre-order, because gods DAMN do I need more of this world, this series, and Lowachee’s writing. HELLS TO THE YES!

The Mountain Crown is breathtaking, a book I wanted to reread the moment I finished it. It feels new, without being so challenging as to become off-putting or difficult. I loved the world, the dragons, the characters, and the prose; there’s nothing at all that I want to change or critique.

Instead, I’d like to push a copy into your hands and insist that you READ IT ASAP!

3 ⭐️

This book was a tangle of paradoxes. It had some beautiful descriptions, and painted an interesting picture of a broken world. Our FMC Méka is traveling to a mountainous place to bring back a king suon (dragon) to her people, in some sort of ritual/rite that is never quite explained. She is part of the Ba’Suon people who have been forced out of their lands by the Kattakan people, and have just been in a Great War against each other… I think.

At the same time this book entranced me with lovely phrasing, it disturbed me at its lack of basic description of people and their interactions. There was hardly any feeling or emotion in this book. I rarely knew how characters felt about situations or each other, because there was very little said about it. Are they mad? Curious? In love? Loathing each other? Worried about the future? There are no implications of feelings, except for occasionally in dialogue when someone would say something curt/gruff and I’d get the impression that they were angry. Otherwise, I assume everyone had a calm, stoic face at all times because the author never implies otherwise. It was so strange.

I loved the relationship between the suon (dragons) and Ba’Suon. The magic/power is quite vague, though. It’s difficult to understand the communication from the suon, and difficult to know what actually happened in this novel. Having finished it, I’m not sure I could tell you what exactly happened or what the main point of the story is.

It’s beautifully written but overly complex, even for such a brief book. This author is obviously greatly talented, but this story fell flat for me, despite the epic adventure.


Thank you NetGalley and Rebellion publisher for this ARC. This review reflects my honest opinion of this book.

This was a book I was hoping to like because I just liked the cover and was hoping to like the story. While it was sort of interesting ideas it presented this just didn't hit for me. The writing and pacing were just off to me. Things just rushed while I was reading it and couldn't really feel any connection with the characters or the story. I think this book wasn't for me but for others they may love it.

3,5 stars

The Mountain Crown is the start to a novella series set in a world where the war from the past still seems very much on the foreground.

In a city where xenophobia is still very real, our main character arrives to do her duty to her people. To gather a powerful dragon, or rather known to her as a Suon. But she stumbles herself into an unexpected situation that gives her companions she wasn't expecting.

The Mountain Crown has a lot of things. Great dragons, great set-up and scenery, great world building. Yet I still struggled a little in places with this story. This has to do with the writing style. Our main character is written in a way that we are still somewhat removed from her. It made it hard to connec to her and to the story. This was especially the case at the start and in the middle in the travels. Yet having said that, once I got used to it, it was mostly fine. I do think that in a full novel I would have more problems with that personally.

I loved the whole idea of this world and the dragons. The dragons felt like real dragons. Meka's people can communicate with them, make contact with them. And there is some form of control, but only if the dragons allow the connection. There is also some great world building of the people of our main character. I got a good feel for how the war has affected them. That was true enrichment.

From the other race we mostly got more of a negative angle, this of course because this was Meka's point of view. But she does befriend one of them. That helped balance it out. I am certainly looking forward to reading the next installment next year.

Thank you to NetGalley and Solaris Books for providing me with an e-ARC for this title.

This novella is impressively detailed for its length. It’s packed with so much emotion and incredible world building that makes this story so immersive. I wasn’t expecting to be so emotionally affected by this story, but the characters and themes were great. I really felt like I couldn’t put this down.

While at times the plot did feel a little rushed due to the story’s length it was still very satisfying. I really just wanted to spend more time in this world and with these characters. I highly recommend!

The Mountain Crown follows our MC as they return to the lands from which she was driven in order to complete a gathering, and capture a King suon for both the land and tradition.

Through the eyes of our MC she explore the effects on the land conquered for its natural resources. Despite its short length, exploration of colonialism is clear and thought provoking.

I enjoyed the following our three main characters as they travel to the mountains and the exploration of the conquest of this land has effected each of them, with their growing bonds allowing for development and adding to the readers understanding of the wider world.

I picked up this book for the dragons, and dragons were a main focus throughout the tale. I adored the dymatics between the suon and the Ba'suon and the vast connection their culture has for the natural world as well as the dragons.

However, at times the writing did feel a little clunky. Yet the plot, characters and the dragons themselves were superb.

The Mountain Crown is the first book in The Crowns of Ishia novella series. This book is quite short, but it definitely delivers. It has dragons and plenty of action, and you can easily read it in one sitting. The worldbuilding is unique and well developed. I really enjoyed it and can't wait to read the next book in the series. Thanks to Netgalley and Rebellion | Solaris for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

There are dragons? You’ve got me ! The way that happens the bond between dragons and humans was unique, the characters Sto arrivando well done and the pace is fast , full of action and kept me on edge. Plus there were discuss in a accurate way important themes like the colonialism,think I’ve appreciated. So in the end end the Mountain Crown is a short but sold read!

Méka is back in her homeland after 10 long years. She has come to perform her birthright, but of course the current occupying force has to have their say. Méka enlists the help of an unlikely partner and together they set off on the perilous jouney.
This story is perfect for dragon lovers. The Mountain Crown is a breathtaking work of fiction. I love when I have to work at reading. The writing in this book is beautiful and I love how focused you have to be to glean meaning from each sentence. Karin Lowachee has crafted an intricate world and characters in so few pages, and I am in awe. There are so many books featuring characters who communicate with dragons, but The Mountain Crown makes that connection between Méka, Raka and the dragons feel bone deep. The author has created an immersive reading experience with this novella and I cannot wait until the next one.

I wish I had liked this book more! While I’ve praised other books recently for guiding me through the basic world building with a light touch, I felt lost when it came to the dragon-speak. I never felt like I was understanding the tone or emotion behind what the dragons were saying. Additionally, the history and the setting itself were super interesting, but something about the pacing felt off to me - more like this was the first act of the story as opposed to the first book in the series. But all that aside, any dragon book gets at least three stars from me!

**Thanks to Netgalley for the eARC and the chance to read this novella early! **

I went into this novella knowing exactly one thing: dragons. And honestly, I got me some dragons! Overall, this didn't take me long to read at all, which I love; I honestly wish more authors would dabble in novellas and give us bite-sized stories to explore worlds in, because I find it fascinating.

As for this story itself, I did enjoy it. I think the characters and the world building weren't quite clear enough from the word go - we did get more clarification around the mid point and the end, but this gave the epic fantasy feeling of being dropped into a world and being told "okay have fun!" with no real direction or point of clarity. I wish that the MC Meka's goal was outlined just a bit clearer by herself or the narration, because whatever bit we did get of it was muddied by the kind of clunky and bad writing of the dialogue and narration of this book. But, once I got into the story, i understood mostly what was going on, which was great.

Things I liked: The dragons, mostly. I didn't super love them being equated with horse-like animals, simply because the dragons that live in my head are incredibly intelligent beings, but that's on me, not on the book.
I also really liked the concept of the connection between the MC's people and the dragons, and I hope we get to see that explored in future books.

What didn't work for me: the writing. my god was it clunky?? There were half sentences throughout the book, badly done descriptions that felt so uneven and off in my head, and my god was the dialogue TOUGH to read. It didn't feel natural at all, which made the reading experience a bit hard - and when the emotional beats hit, I didn't really do anything more than go "oh okay" and continue on because the writing was keeping me from truly connecting with the characters and the story. I wish that I could have turned off my editor brain to get through this and just enjoy the story, because the story was definitely the strong suit, but the way it was told to me was just not it for me.

it literally ends on an incomplete sentence, which made me just laugh.

Despite all of that, it gets a lower four star rating because the ideas and the world and the core of the story was good enough to keep it going for me. I hope that the next book is better, and that we get to explore this world and the dragons more!

3.5 stars rounded up.

This is a very unique start to a series about indigenous people forced from their lands and the dragons they lived in harmony with by war. The story understands that it's a novella and spends no time infodumping, instead trusting the audience to make inferences and come to an understanding with the minimum amount of explanation. The prose is also very present and lyrical. I really appreciated being treated like an adult who can put pieces together on my own...

...except for when something happens with the "magic" in this book around the 75% mark. I wish there was more signalling as to what "magic" can do in this world before that point, because up until then I was led to believe that these indigenous people had extra sensory perception that allowed them to connect to nature, each other, and dragons in a way that the other types of humans couldn't, but nope. There's actual magic and I don't understand it. The story fell apart for me after this point, although I mostly understood why the things that happened occurred.

Ultimately, this wasn't a story for me but I hope it gets a lot of attention. Thank you so much to NetGalley and Rebellion Publishing for this ARC!

Un style original et unique et un worldbuilding dense et passionnant, voilà une belle bouffée d'air frais au milieu du regain d'intérêt pour les dragons.

Dans The Mountain Crown On suit Meka, une Ba'Suon, qui retourne sur ses terres ancestrales dont son peuple a été en partie chassé pour prélever un suon, un dragon et le ramener auprès de son clan. Mais évidemment, les convoitises de ceux qui n'hésitent pas à asservir les suon vont quelque peu changer ses plans alors qu'elle trouvera des alliés inattendus sur sa route.

En une centaine de page The Mountain Crown amène un lore fascinant où dragons et spiritualités sont liés. J'ai adoré la manière dont communiquent les suon avec les Ba'Suon, même si cela rend parfois la lecture complexe. Il faut parfois un peu de patience ou d'attention, la langue n'est pas la plus accessible, mais quel regal.

J'ai adoré évidemment la dénonciation du colonialisme, opposant de manière classique une société d'oppresseurs déconnectés du monde naturel et des natifs qui le respectent. J'ai vraiment senti un coté western et en même temps avec une touche asiatique qui rendait l'univers vraiment unique. Les personnages campés avec soin, uniques dans leurs voix, donnent vraiment envie de lire la suite pour pouvoir creuser leurs zones d'ombres, même si ce premier volume se suffit techniquement à lui-même.

Un récit complexe, un univers fascinant et original, un propos engagé, il ne m'en faut pas plus pour me convaincre de suivre avec attention le reste de la série !

Meka is on her way to catch a king dragon, but before her journey really even gets started, she is finding herself in trouble with the local law.

Meka can communicate with the dragons, but the way the communicate is hard to understand at times and by the end of the book I just found it annoying. Her people have a fragile treaty with the Kattakans and in order to get a dragon and get back home she must have her papers. The sheriff took them from her, and to get them back she must bring him a king dragon. To cause her even more trouble, he also sends along a man who is supposed to work for him to ensure she brings the dragon back to him, which she has no intention of doing, but we only find that out at the end. Meka just kind of goes along with everything until the end.

Through the whole journey Meka is trying to get Raka to turn against the sheriff and rejoin his people. I never really understood why it mattered so much to her, and I didn’t get the relationship Raka had with the other men who he supposedly betrayed.

I really enjoyed the start of this book, but halfway through it started to drag and I got lost with what was going on and what the main point of the story was. The ending was cool, but it didn’t feel satisfying, and I’m left with more questions than answers.

This book is just so dang cool.

The Plot
The Mountain Crown follows Méka as she travels to the Crown Mountains to gather a king suon (dragon). As a Ba’Suon, she sees the world a little differently, and has an empathetic connection to both suon and the natural world.

To gather a king, however, she must enter Kattakan towns and countryside, the people who drove Méka’s people from their homelands and do not want her people to succeed. As she travels she finds Lilley, a Kattakan veteran who fought with the Ba’Suon in the war, turned slave. After buying his freedom and the freedom of the dragon with him, the town’s Lord forces Ba’Suon traitor Raka to travel with the two and ensure Méka brings a king suon for the town’s consumption before she gathers one to help her people’s herd. It is a dangerous journey, and Méka must make sense of Lilley (who is Kattakan but acts Ba’Suon) and Raka (who is Ba’Suon but acts Kattakan), her dream that sent her on this mission in the first place, and the world around her.

What I Liked:
This book does dragons in such a unique and awe-inspiring way. I loved the empathetic connection that the Ba’Suon had with each other and the suon.

The themes of colonialism, family, and balance of good vs. evil in the world were exceptionally well done and thought provoking.

The pacing of this novella is top tier- everything moved at just the right pace and I never found myself wanting more or less from any scene.

The characters, the world, the suon, the fact that this says “Book One” on the front - I am in love with everything. Will be buying once this comes out, perhaps to annotate, and I look forward to more stories in this world!

Interesting read. I liked the cultural elements around the dragons. Didn't fully connect with the characters which is why it was 4 stars but I haven't read anything that quite touched on the same feelings of living amongst dragons as this book did.

We’re living in a new golden age of SFF novellas, and Karin Lowachee’s latest fantasy offering is one of the standouts. THE MOUNTAIN CROWN serves up a layered, immersive introduction to a world distorted by colonization and peopled with characters shaped by both tradition and circumstance.

The more I think about this book, the more I like it. It strikes the perfect balance between subtle and direct. A lot goes unvoiced, but never unsaid, and while there may be a few easy answers out there, there are no easy solutions. Lowachee digs into how the physical, environmental, and cultural trauma her characters endure impacts everything about how they see the world and negotiate their place in it. And she does it all within a 150-page story about a journey through a frontier in an attempt to bond with dragons.

Highly recommended. I can’t wait for the next novella in the Crowns of Iskia sequence.