Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame by Neon Yang
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: East Asian-coded MC and love interest, F/F
Published on: 6th May 2025
Goodreads

With an armored, oath-bound hero reminiscent of The Mandalorian and the Asian-inspired epic fantasy of She Who Became the Sun, Neon Yang’s Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame is a stunning queer novella about a dragon hunter finding home with a dragon queen.

Few know the true identity of the masked guildknight of Mithrandon.

She barely remembers herself.

The masked guildknight—Yeva—was thirteen when she killed her first dragon. With her gift revealed, she was shipped away to the imperial capital to train in the rare art of dragon-slaying. Now a legendary dragon hunter, she has never truly felt at home—nor removed her armor in public—since that fateful day all those years ago.

Yeva must now go to Quanbao, a fiercely independent and reclusive kingdom. It is rumored that there, dragons are not feared as is right and proper, but instead loved and worshipped. It is rumored that there, they harbor a dragon behind their borders.

While Yeva searches for the dreaded beast, she is welcomed into the palace by Quanbao’s monarch, Lady Sookhee. Though wary of each other, Yeva is shocked to find herself slowly opening up to the beautiful, mysterious queen.

As they grow closer, Yeva longs to let Lady Sookhee see the person behind the armor, but she knows she must fulfill her purpose and slay the dragon. Ultimately, she must decide who—or what—she is willing to her own heart, or the sacred duty that she has called home for so long.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I read Brighter Than Scale a day after rereading The Black Tides of Heaven – which made it pretty clear that the former just doesn’t compare.

Everything about Brighter Than Scale should work – the characters, the dragons, the worldbuilding, Yeva’s character arc. It’s a recipe that seems guaranteed to blow us away, especially from this author!

And the beginning is very strong. Yeva slays a (small!) dragon as a child, and is sent away to a soul-crushing order of knights to be trained. They forge her into a weapon, a machine; by the time the story really gets going, she’s barely a person. It’s heartbreaking and enraging and I wanted the father who sent her to them dropped off a cliff.

But once Yeva gets to Quanbao, all the promise the story had dissolves into dust. The pacing is a mess; simultaneously too slow – in that nothing seems to happen, pages after pages just dragging – and too fast – the gradual undoing of Yeva’s depersonalisation, for example, isn’t shown to us, but told to us. Worse, it’s summarised to us. And the entire book hinges on this! Yeva realising how close Quanbao’s culture and language are to that of her home; her complicated feelings about engaging with them; her first baby-steps in exploring and engaging with these things, trying to find her own through them. Relearning how to be a person. More than anything else, Yeva’s character-arc is the story – and it’s so frustrating, and puzzling, to not see it, to have it skimmed over and kind of handwaved rather than explored.

We don’t see the relationship develop between Yeva and Sookhee, either. Days after finishing the book, I still have no idea what drew them to each other. I can’t even call it instalust; there’s just nothing between them. These are two people who have every reason in the world not to trust each other, to despise each other, even! You’re going to have to be extremely convincing to sell me on their loving each other enough to overcome all the things in their way. And Yang doesn’t do that at all.

I mean, there isn’t much of Yeva to draw anyone. She’s a very one-note character – and that makes perfect sense! For the first chunk of the book, it’s very effective, even: she’s been brutalised into thinking of herself as a tool, an object, so of course there’s not a whole lot of personality there. But I was expecting her to develop a personality, to see her finding local foods she especially liked, learning the names of native flora, stumbling her way through books. It would have been so easy to give her an interest, or pleasure in, clothing, given that it’s a whole Thing that she has pretty much lived in her armour all her adult life, and Sookhee is the one who gets her out of it. (…Not in a sex way! Although that as well, I guess!) Give her some kind of likes and dislikes, interests, thoughts!

As-is…I don’t know what Sookhee saw in Yeva, because there didn’t seem to be anything to see.

I did like that Yang subverted expectations during the climax; Yeva doesn’t do what I think most of us would expect her to do, and Sookhee puts the practical over sentiment at the end of the finale, something I always like to see characters doing in such moments. The final pages were…predictable, but in a satisfying way, so I’m not critiquing them.

Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame by Neon Yang falls very flat. The premise is incredible; the execution is shallow. Maybe part of that was the length constraint; maybe this one would have done better as a novel instead of a novella. It’s lacking something, for all that it’s clearly supposed to be very deep and poignant. Alas.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to reread the rest of the Tensorate books.

Related Posts