Together they must navigate the surprises to come for beyond the prospect of a new-born dragon Albiyon is about to face a dangerous conspiracy that threatens the peace of their realm.įlames of Albiyon is a story of friendship, love, and acceptance that celebrates queer identity. Never having dreamed of dragons she is forced to seek out guidance from the exhilarating Isla, last direct descendent of the royal family and companion to a century-old dragon. When she unwittingly awakens a sleeping dragon’s egg, Adairia is thrust into unfamiliar territory.

Preferring to hole up in the library than seek adventure elsewhere, she has grown accustomed to her comfortable routine… until the day everything changes. Raised within the Albiyan university’s walls she has dedicated her life to the pursuit of knowledge. But Menzies is a good writer and I enjoyed the storytelling, though it is also clear that the her fiction skills will grow and develop as she continues to write – a process I am keen to follow.Each copy comes with a bookplate signed by Jean Menzies!Ī century since the monarchy was overthrown, the country of Albiyon has become a haven for its citizens, the young scholar Adairia included. The book is self-published, and there were a handful more copyediting errors than a professionally published book would generally have, plus a number of instance of sentence-level wording and flow that I suspect would have been changed. The island of Albiyon where it is set, for instance, got rid of its monarchy a century before, and it is a sort of medieval parliamentary social democracy-slash-cooperative commonwealth, including a faction that are clearly High Tories (without using that language) wanting to roll it all back, as well as street-level (clearly BNP-inspired) nativist thugs stirring up trouble. She writes on antiquity for both adults and children as well as publishing fantasy. It is an interesting mix of embracing some conventions of this type of fantasy and turning others upside down. Jean Menzies is an ancient historian and award-winning author from Scotland. The book is a vaguely-medieval-Europe, dragons-and-castles-and-magic sort of fantasy that I don’t read a ton of these days, but it is infused with a sensibility that is Scottish (she’s from Edinburgh), feminist, socialist (in a broad sense), queer, and hopepunk, so I couldn’t very well *not* read it.

I picked this one up because the author makes bookish content online that I quite like – her taste in books isn’t the same as mine, but it’s related, and she’s smart and politically interesting so I enjoy her videos.

The Flames of Albiyon by Jean Menzies