Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Secondary World Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: F/F, fictional minority cast
PoV: First-person, present-tense
ISBN: 196018900X
Goodreads
It’s the eve of the biggest dragon race in the city of Yemareir. Zaya Shearwater and her wife, Kiriki, have spent the year shooting up the rankings, and now they’re favored to win. But how did a team of women from Yemareir’s roughest precincts become the favorites in a sport where most winners buy their victories?
Doctor of Journalism Shenireen Agama wants to know. Through interviews with Zaya, Kiriki, and the ground crew that’s become their family, she begins to weave a story. Its threads are love, desperation, biology, and magic – all bound together with the early history of Yemareir, where Zaya and Kiriki’s ancestors fled centuries ago to escape the pogroms of a mad king, and where the colonists resettling the ruins of an ancient city have just discovered that it is home to dragons…
Brimstone Slipstream is the opening novella in the Streets of Flame Quartet, to be followed by Windburn Whiplash, Heatstroke Heartbeat, and Wildfire Riptide.
Highlights
~sapphic dragon racers
~neon feathered dragons
~when found-family -> legal family!
~what are these two nobodies doing dominating this sport
~it’s FREE so you have no excuse not to read it
I’M GONNA NEED EVERYBODY TO DROP WHAT THEY’RE DOING AND GO READ THIS RIGHT NOW.
(You can find it on Smashwords, the Big River site, Kobo, everywhere, COMPLETELY FREE!)
Quick context: I’ve been struggling to read anything new, instead of rereading old faves, this month; I’ve also felt like I have nothing to say about what I’ve been reading. This book, though, lit me up like a Roman candle and blew my reading slump to smithereens AND ALSO I WANT TO NEVER SHUT UP ABOUT IT so, you know. That should already be enough proof that it’s excellent!
Brimstone Slipstream is a novella – just 65 pages, according to Goodreads – that introduces us to the setting and characters of Weber’s Street of Flames series. The conceit is that it’s an article written by a journalist, interviewing the best dragon-racing team around, with enough context and background info to be interesting and informative to readers who don’t know much about dragon racing – LIKE, YOU KNOW. US IN THE REAL WORLD.
This is just – such a great introduction to the world Weber’s created. It’s incredibly readable, and sort of friendly – Shenireen’s voice is wonderful, her kind of wry slant on things, her genuine fascination with the topic and people she’s covering, and most of all the way she invites the readers of her paper to come along on this journey with her. Some of her explanations do get a little dense at times – I had to read a couple of passages twice to be sure I understood what was being said – but only momentarily, and what’s being told to us is so worth the bit of extra effort!
Zaya and Kiriki are characters who aren’t going to give all their secrets away to some journalist. They come from a disenfranchised minority, who are not supposed to be rocketing to the top of the rankings in a sport dominated by the rich-and-dumb – and are killing it anyway. I loved meeting them, and their family, who are also their racing team. In this world, people’s found/forged-families can become their legal families, so although Zaya and Kiriki are the only ones married, the rest of the team also bear the name Shearwater, despite not being blood-relations. I approve immensely.
The worldbuilding is detailed, original, and phenomenal: we have multiple species of feathered dragons who can adapt physiologically to environmental stressors, empaths, Central/South-American vibes, ancient cities built by magically advanced nomads, cycles of colonialism and immigration… I’m honestly stunned, and so impressed, by how much thought has gone into this! And I adore that it looks like nothing else I’ve ever read, no other setting I’ve seen. Bits of it have a very modern flavour – like the classism and racism endemic to the sport of dragon-racing – but so much of it is just perfectly unique: a city where people move from district to district in time with the breeding cycles of different dragon breeds! THAT IS SO FREAKING COOL!
And of course, there’s that gut-punch ending.
TL;DR: I fell in love with this world and cast in 65 pages, and I am diving into book two (which is on sale for only $0.99 this month on all sites!) the second I post this. I am mad I didn’t hear about this series till now, and I fully intend to make it everyone else’s problem.
JOIN ME!
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