Just finished this too and am organizing my thoughts for a review. **Loved** how she looked at the different facets of love--and also morality and justice--returning to them with new insights and unfolding them in different ways,** and loved how this happened through *conversation*. Drama and tension can be very present even without people buckling a single swash. Plus: humor! I laughed at some of the parson's lines.

Gray is very good at creating prickly characters who are very sympathetic in spite of being prickly (thinking of some things written under a different name), but in those books, the prickly characters were the viewpoint characters. Here, because the parson rather than the dragon was the viewpoint character, I at first didn't really *like* the dragon, though I had pity for him. But he's grown on me a lot as I've let the book sit with me, and I think that's in part because I love the parson so much, and I can see *his* feelings about the the dragon deepening.

**I really loved, for instance, how at appropriate moments we first feel pity for the fairy, treated so badly by the people at the Briarley estate, and then see from another perspective how the fairy's own actions were excessively vindictive. Fairies are always laying down excessive punishments in stories, but while in fairy tales that has the effect of reinforcing aspirational norms (like "be kind to strangers in need"), Gray goes beyond that and looks at what it means for human failings to be punished so harshly. What I love is that the story carries off both things with sincerity and and passion.

She's a great writer.