I stayed up until 4:00 a.m. to finish this book because it was so captivating.

Though she lives in a kingdom controlled by a sadistic king who has caused the land to become infertile by killing off all the healers called Phaetyns, Ryn is an optimist and wants adventure in her life. She didn't realize what she was asking for because her life soon became a nightmare.

Her boss, who is like family, holds rebel meetings at the tavern where she works. Ryn isn't part of it but she likes to eavesdrop whenever possible. She, like everyone else, wants to overthrow the king and his powerful Drae who hunts traitors from the sky.

Lord Irrik is a dragon shifter called a Drae who is the Boogeyman of the children's tales. Everyone fears him because of the stories and rumors, some true and some not. He is bound to the king by a blood oath so he carries out every monstrous order the king commands him to do. He has no choice.

Ryn meets Lord Irrik one night when she's trying to make it home before curfew. From there, things just went terribly wrong. She ended up being taken to the king where everyone knows that once you go in to the palace, you never come out again.

I'm going to go off subject a little here and tell about something that might be not be relevant or contribute to the book review or summary but might hit a chord with other reviewers.

I take lots of notes when reading books. It helps me with my reviews and I go back into them to refresh myself if it has been a while in between one book and the next book of the series. Recently, I've been using voice to text to record the notes and I kept cracking up at what was actually being written in the notes. The program never adjusted to “Lord Irrick” and it was never consistent with what it thought it heard. Iam not sure if it is the way I pronounce things or what but the results were annoyingly funny. It wrote “Lord Eric” most of the time but it also wrote then “Lori Rick”, “lore ick”, and “Laura Rock”. I kept on having to correct it which took more time than it was worth.

Back to the actual book review.

Ryn was easy to like except that she was easily fooled and made a lot of wrong assumptions and conclusions about things that seemed obvious to me which caused her a lot of hardships she could have avoided.

I am getting ready to download the next book in the series. ( )

Pretty interesting!

This was different than I thought it would be. The romance is fairly minimal, definitely more of a slow burn. The mythology of the Drae and the Phaetyns was pretty cool and I definitely want more info about that.
Ryn is captured by Lord Irrik, the king's enslaved Drae. Irrik can transform into a dragon which is freaking awesome lol. Ryn endures torture every day as the king attempts to find out what she knows about the rebellion. Those parts were sad and I'm glad Ryn had Ty and Tyr there for her.
The book was a quick read and I'm excited to read book 2! ( )

I saw this popping up a lot in my groups and I didn’t think it’d be that great honestly. I mean half naked man on the cover, meh. Boy was I wrong! I loved this series, Darkest Drae had a great world and the characters were amazing. A lot in YA authors use this over abundance of angst to create tension and drama within a story. I think Wagner did perfec, using the plot and world for action and drama... not the mc. ( )

😊😊😊

Wow. I loved this book so much. I put of reading it for a long time thinking I wouldnt like it ,then today I was like no I am going to read it and man I am glad I did. Your writing style is beautiful and story is spell binding. ( )