I’m in shock after finishing this book. I could not put it down and I’m hoping there will be a second one. It’s an interesting take on dragons and the way they communicate. I wasn’t expecting to love this book so much but it is so different from anything I’ve ever read and there is also a priest in training. I love me a rebel priest. I would definitely recommend this book based on how unique and fast paced it is!!!

i went into this skeptical as it came to my attention from an administrator at school who is always anxious for attention and who said he had heard it might bridge the gap between Wings of Fire and Fourth Wing. Well that's a mighty big gap to bridge! Despite my skepticism, I was really wrapped up in the story until about half to 3/4 in. I love the concept of Bletchley Park and dragons. I can totally get behind the allusions to current day corrupt politics and the messed up class system. And once one person started going Hunger Games on things, I was even more excited. But then.... Then, Viv didn't seem to be learning anything despite all she had heard and seen. And the exposition on languages was tiresome. And once the battle started, it was neverending. Everything really bogged down for me from about 70% on, which is too bad given that it started on such a high note for me.

Yes, the premise of this is ridiculous, and I think it would have been much better served in a made up country rather than England. That being said, this was SO difficult to put down. It was pure entertainment and delight, like eating too much ice cream in one sitting. It's something I know the Fourth Wing girlies are gonna love. I cannot wait for the next one.

"In an alternate London in 1923, one girl accidentally breaks the tenuous truce between dragons and humans in this sweeping debut and epic retelling of Bletchley Park steeped in language, class, and forbidden romance. Perfect for teen fans of Fourth Wing and Babel.

Dragons soar through the skies and protests erupt on the streets, but Vivien Featherswallow isn't worried. She's going to follow the rules, get a summer internship studying dragon languages, be smart, be sweet, and make sure her little sister never, ever has to risk growing up Third Class. She just has to free one dragon.

By midnight, Viv has started a civil war.

With her parents and cousin arrested and her sister missing, Viv is brought to Bletchley Park as a codebreaker - if she succeeds, she and her family can all go home again. If she doesn't, they'll all die.

As Viv begins to discover the secrets of a hidden dragon language, she realizes that the fragile peace treaty that holds human and dragon societies together is corrupt, and the dangerous work Viv is doing could be the thread that unravels it."

I love that while an alternate London it's set in a time period were rarely see fantasy set in.

I was really disappointed with this book. I felt like this book was gonna go a different direction than it went. I thought the different dragon languages and a sacred dragon language to be intriguing but that’s about it. The only thing that kept me reading was the possibility of saving a skip from my book subscription. The romance was not enough for me and it made me a little uncomfortable that the boy that was trying to become a priest but flirting with the FMC.

Thank you to the author, HarperCollins Children’s, and NetGalley for this e-ARC.

4.5⭐️

Babel, but with dragons? Yes please! This book had a similar premise to Babel, with its focus on translation and its use in control. However, both had (obviously) incredibly different plots.

While this book was a bit lower YA than I had anticipated, it was still a great read and had me completely hooked. The overall message was direct and to the point, but there was also an incredibly binary sense of what was good vs what was “evil” rather than adding much nuance. Since this book is YA, and read as a bit younger than expected, this message and clear-cut good vs evil makes quite a lot of sense.

That being said, I really enjoyed this book and the characters! I think this book could easily be expanded upon to create a great duology or trilogy. This would further expand on the message AND allow for a more descriptive “what next”.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for providing a free e-arc of this book.

This book is a very political, class system, and linguistics based tale including dragons and the history of them and the secrets of their language. It wraps together very well how language affects us as an entire population and can bring us together, but also can tear us apart with barriers as well as through the power of manipulation and control.

A Language Of Dragons starts out with us learning in the time setting in 1920s London that there is a peace agreement between humans and dragons as there has been conflict in the past establishing a class system allowing only certain individuals to be able to have access to some knowledge/language of the dragons.

The main character Vivian tries to gain an internship to learn more about the Dragonese language, but her quest is set to the side and a new one begins when her parents are arrested and found to be followers of the rebellion, and Vivian herself aids in starting a civil war between the government and dragons.

There are many social notes throughout the book that really hit home with current issues of today, which normally I do not like in my fiction, but the author did this so well it really added to the atmosphere of the story. The characters also had good personalities, though Vivian, the main character, made many questionable choices that make you scratch your head at times and just wonder...why?

There was not a lot of action throughout the book except towards the end, which was a big negative for me as the continuous talking and plotting became very tedious after a while, though of course it does provide more depth to the story, I just like having some action scenes throughout my fantasy books, especially when more politically driven.

Overall, I did enjoy this book and recommend giving it a read when it is released! Seems there will be a second book as well, so I will be interested in picking that one up once it is out as well.

A really delightful book! Our story is about a teenage girl and her family who live in London during a time where there are dragons. The main female character, Vivien , lives with her younger sister, Ursa, her cousin, Marquis, his father and her parents. When a group of rebel protesters show up next to their home, the world changes for Vivien and her family. Vivien and Marquis are forced to things they never imagined. The story is filled with a lot of mystery and intrigue and I found the story interesting, full of adventure and a bit of romance as well. All in all, a good read!

A Language of Dragons is an instant young adult classic, and I hope it is a new favorite for the upcoming generation as The Hunger Games and Divergent were for mine. This novel is not only extremely engaging and interesting, but a complete standout in the genre for its character work and plotting. I am truly blown away by Williamson’s ability to create flawed characters who have done truly bad things, yet the reader undeniably roots for. The politics were very engaging and felt natural to the story, inspiring the characters and the reader to take action. The world building offers a great visual while still leaving open ends to explore. I loved everything about this and cannot wait to dive deeper into the series! This just might be my favorite 2024 read.

I had a great time reading this and I am grateful that I had been approved for the ebook of this on Netgalley. I have been sorely disappointed with many books lately that try to says that there is politics, cloak and dagger, revolution and of course dragons. (I am still trying to pretend fourth wing doesn't exist) This book made up for it. It gave me what I wanted. While the fmc made me want to smack her sometimes, (she made some really dumb decisions) I could see her grow as a person and I started rooting for her.

Thanks to Harper Fire for the ARC copy in exchange for an honest review.

London, 1923 an event happens that changes the world and a war erupts between humans and dragons. And Vivian Featherswallow is in the middle of it. All Vivian wants to do is go to school and get an internship to study dragon languages and watch her younger sister grow up. However, when her parents are arrested as rebels, her entire world is flipped upside down. A lifeline, a job is offered to her, in exchange her family will be safe. Arriving at Bletchley Park, she discovers she’s been recruited as a Codebreaker and helping the war effort.

At first Vivian believes her challenge is doable and she’ll be able to finish it. But as time goes on, she realizes her task is damn near impossible and the bubble she’s grown up in isn’t as safe as she thought, and eventually Viv must ask the question: what war is she really fighting?

This story was epic and was immediately sucked into the story. This book was unlike anything I’ve read and I immediately loved Vivian. Thought it took her a bit of time to come around, it was fun reading her grow as a character. She did something really stupid to begin with but with her new friends she has some tough realizations. I really hope there’s a sequel as the book ended epically. I laughed (Vivian’s sarcasm is epic), cried (the ending) and fell in love with the characters throughout the story. Highly recommend this book.

On sale January 7, 2025.

A Language of Dragons starts with a note from the author, which I found very valuable to set the stage for the characters and to use that lens while reading. I found Vivien challenging at the beginning, but I understood her motivations. While I didn't approve of her decisions, I think they were important to illustrate her as a character, and important for the story as a while. S. F. Williamson creates an intriguing world, and weaves the story in a way where it's easy to read and I wanted to keep going to see how the characters interacted and moved throughout the world.

I’d like to begin with the warning that I would not classify this book to be under dark academia, nor slow-burn enemies to lovers. Yes, our main character spends a great deal of time within a school-like setting, but it is not dark academia - in fact, a good portion of this book is barely focused on the academia portion at all. Instead, we spend a great deal of time with our main character trying to decide between her morals and her family, with the work she is doing taking a much-more backseat to the story. As well, her romantic lead and her fairly quickly move to involving themselves with one another, and the closest we get to ‘enemies’ is them having different backgrounds and occasionally disagreeing with them. They are never actually enemies, and the only way I could see this as being “slow-burn” is if you include the fact that they don’t have sex and barely kiss within this novel, which is not what that word means. I feel like this description might have been written by someone who has not read this book, so I would recommend looking elsewhere if that is the only thing about this book that caught your interest as you will be sorely disappointed.

I have not read Fourth Wing, so I can’t speak on any comparisons people have made with that book and this one. I have, however, read Babel and can say I can see where the comparisons come from, but I would say that Babel focuses much more on the actual language/magic learning in the academic setting, while this one has it much more as a background activity to the rest of the novel. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as I found some of the focus on the language in Babel to bog me down a bit, but I do think this book would have benefited from focusing more on the main character being a polyglot - in both human and dragon languages. We are only given a few words in this book that aren’t in English, even during sections where she is not speaking in English, and at times I found it difficult to pick up what language she was speaking until the text explicitly states it. Considering she only speaks to her mother in Bulgarian, and typically switches languages in the middle when speaking with dragons, I think having a bit more focus - and possibly a few words/language learned - would have benefited this story. As it is, there is no difference between this main character being a polyglot and someone who only speaks one language. The closest we get to Robin Swift’s dilemma in Babel about what language he thinks/breathes in, which one is his “first” and “second” language - is at the very beginning where she wakes up thinking of a word in a dragon language that she can’t immediately translate. Otherwise she seems to have no issues speaking over 6 languages and never flubs her words, or mixes up words from the wrong language, which I found to be a bit unrealistic.

It also takes Vivian significantly longer than Robin Swift in Babel to actually choose her morals (about 70% into the book), and yet somehow she was able to make friends and acquaintances have faith in her and trust her with secrets that could get them executed. Her main romantic lead even states that he had faith in her the entire time, despite her telling him over and over again that she would choose her family over the rest of the country. Every single time you thought Vivian was going to (finally) make a decision on who to choose, she’d waffle about it and then choose both and neither at the same time. It got tedious after a while, and I’ll be honest I was almost hoping she’d decide to betray everyone around her to get what she wanted as it would have at least made her character more interesting. Instead, she is allowed to constantly make bad decisions that hurt those around her, but is then forgiven for them anyway.
For instance, in the past Vivian had done something that had ruined her former friends life - but when it comes out, it doesn’t take that friend too long to forgive her actions. It also annoyed me that Vivian’s apology kind of felt like she tried to guilt Sophie into forgiving her, by constantly going, “It’s okay if you don’t forgive me, I wouldn't either.” But then she ruins it by finishing with saying that she’d find a way to forgive herself for those actions - apologizing but then telling that person that you’d forgive yourself for hurting them? Surprised Sophie didn't deck you for that one, girl.

Finally, I felt like this book went a bit too far with the implication that every dragon from Bulgaria was a human-hunting evil monster, despite the fact that the main dragon character was Bulgarian and had severe guilt over her actions in the past. Not to mention that we find out that a lot of those previous evil actions were actually orchestrated by a human government who used the feelings of betrayal of those dragons to manipulate them into doing such violence. It doesn’t absolve it, but it does make it seem a bit suspicious that even after finding this out, our main character still sees Bulgarian dragons as untrustworthy. Vivian even explicitly states that, “Bulgarian dragons don’t ally with humans,” despite working with one this entire time.

Overall, I did feel like this book was a strong debut and did fairly well with the issues brought up in this novel, and I am interested in seeing what comes next. If you like political intrigue, betrayals and secret identities, and dragons (although, much less involved than you’d expect given the title), I would recommend picking up this book and seeing for yourself.

Thank you to the author, NetGalley, and Harper Collins for providing this e-ARC.

The world is on the verge of war and there are dragons! Seriously think WWII with Dragons!!! There is political turmoil, foreign influence, seriously intense academia, and some amazing characters. This should be high on everyone’s TBR.

# A Language of Dragons
# 11/16/2024 ~ 11/27/2024
# 5.0 / 5.0

5/5 stars

(Mild spoilers ahead!)

I went into A Language of Dragons having completely forgotten any of the (thankfully) vague premise besides "linguistics" and "dragons," and I'm deeply grateful. I had no high expectations and no comp titles to pit it against until I was already a quarter of the way in.

This book satisfied my craving for something in a similar political wheelhouse to Hunger Games, though not just because "there's a rebellion against a corrupt government." It was refreshing to see protagonist Vivien as imperfect and self-serving, caring only for herself and her family, even at the cost of others, and eventually suffer a crisis of self over it. Viv's POV might have annoyed me if the author hadn't done such an excellent job of undertoning Viv's desperation to cling to the one thing she still holds to be true after her entire world view has already been shattered: the necessity of the Peace Agreement between humans and dragons.

There weren't any moments I felt bored reading, or wanted to rush to get through to the next chapter. However, I wasn't heavily invested in the romantic subplot — mainly because the story elements and worldbuilding were so excellent that I genuinely didn't expect any romance at all! By the time a relationship had formed between Viv and her love interest Atlas, I was almost surprised, having been distracted by the history and politics of this alternate world.

I'm deeply grateful that the romance didn't overshadow Viv's character arc; Viv never forgot that her family was depending on her success, and the reason she convinced herself to take what actions she did.

The highest praise I can give is that this book reminded me why I love reading so much. Every time I picked the story back up, I was immediately sucked in again, desperate to see how the story would unfold.

I highly recommend picking this one up!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a free digital ARC for my honest review!

I received this book as an ARC from netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This book snagged my attention right from the start. A oppressive government enforcing a corrupt tiered class system that simultaneously persecutes Dragon rights mixed with the academia of languages is such a compelling plot line.

The FMC, Viv, is raised middle class and strives to make it in academia and keep her proud class status. While I understood the need to allow for character development and growth I did find Viv quite frustrating to follow and root for. She refused to open up her perspective on life and kept making the same stubborn and narrow minded choices over and over again until almost every one she cared about was risking their life and she was left alone on her path.

I appreciated the world building of the first world war leading into the truth behind a civil rebellion and connecting it to the uprising occurring in the current timeline. I felt by the end of the book I truly understood the rebellion as well as the nature of the Dragons fighting on both sides. I very much am looking forward to seeing this series develop and learning more about the nature and alliance between Dragons and humans.

DNF

I wanted to like this so bad but really couldn't get over how annoying the FMC was. She wasn't likeable and even the little suspicions we get about her character super early on, it's known that she's done some fairly unforgivable things. I think the world is super cool and I enjoyed the writing. I suspect that if this book was written in anyone else's POV I would have gotten much further into the book and would have enjoyed it a lot more.

I do think that this is a good book for people that like reading about unlikable main characters and prefer darker shades of gray to their MCs; unfortunately that's just not for me.

I was given this ARC from NetGalley. I had no idea what this book was about but seeing dragons on the cover I dived in. This book is one of my favorite books this year! It was absolutely incredible!! I can’t wait for it to come out in paperback so I can ready it again !! If you love dragons, dark academia, war, language and politics you will love this book!

*Living in the world of dragons feels as extraordinary as it sounds.*

Told from the perspective of Maren, a young linguist with an unshakable curiosity, *A Language of Dragons* swept me into a world where words hold immense power—especially the words of dragons. Maren's voice is equal parts clever and uncertain, making her journey feel personal and captivating as she uncovers a hidden language that could reshape everything she thought she knew about her world.

The dragons themselves are as much characters as the humans in the story. They’re majestic and complex, speaking in a way that feels both ancient and deeply thoughtful. I loved how Williamson brought them to life—not just as mythical creatures but as beings with their own culture, motives, and mysteries.

The pacing does stumble in places, with some sections dwelling a bit too long on Maren’s internal struggles, but it pays off in the emotional depth it adds to her arc. The supporting cast is a mixed bag—some characters shine brightly, adding layers of warmth or tension, while others fade a little too easily into the background.

But what truly stands out is the theme of communication—how language bridges divides, uncovers secrets, and forges connections. It’s a beautifully crafted story that leaves you wondering what you’d say if given the chance to speak with a dragon. Fans of imaginative worlds and thought-provoking tales will find much to admire here.

I need more from this author. Much, much, more.
Thank you to the author, publisher and Net Galley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was such an incredibly well written book. I loved every single minute of this book and could not put it down.

“A Language of Dragons” was a very well thought out and planned book as far as character development and world building. I would hope that there is a second book coming. I loved our FMC characters development throughout the book. There is a huge motive of finding yourself through her that you get to know.

Overall S.F. Williamson did an amazing job on the development and portrayal of this book I cannot wait to read what is next.