penwalla

ch. 8
violet was warned to sleep in her armor and she's putting it on the morning in this first scene. hope that comes back to bite her later.
squad leaders apparently don't enforce curfew and everyone is boinking everyone. again, this seems stupid for a military training academy. where is the discipline
dain and violet's flirting is so cringe. girl either commit to fucking him or don't
in general every character reads younger than they are. this is apparently an adult fantasy (new adult?) but it reads very YA. in a bad way--i have read YA that was better than this by a wide margin
she says she's never kept a secret from dain, but presumably he's not in on her "poison my way through training" idea, right?
side note: it seems that anyone bonded with a dragon gets a special magical power in addition to "lesser magics". these aren't unique--they seem to be divided into categories, and tbh it feels like yarros just adds one whenever the plot requires it. but i still don't understand what this means. the treaty between humans and dragons has to do with the wards that humans lay, or something. so do some humans have magic of their own separate from the dragon-given abilities?
in another incredibly clunky infodrop, we learn about dragons during class. the dragons are powerful and sentient, and can just kill people. which makes their cooperation with humans baffling. why do they need riders at all?
apparently the number of dragons is decreasing every year. no one knows why. again, this really should impact the way the military handles dragon rider training, but it doesn't, because yarros clearly hasn't thought for more than two seconds about any aspect.
if the dragons only speak to their bonded and are disinclined to answer questions about even basic shit, where the hell are they getting all this info for classes?
also the dragon classification is very boring. basically every dragon breed is color plus noun-tail. calling it now, the super special genius black dragon will be violet's.
after class, the professor pulls violet aside to tell her how smart and nice she is
special black dragon's previous rider apparently died tried to resurrect violet's dead brother. who probably isn't dead, based on how many times he's been mentioned, lol. the professor says it was because the rider wanted to impress violet's mom, but that's idiotic, so i'm ignoring it.
ok next scene. it's time for sparring. violet's opponent has apparently been plotting her death. dain is doing his usual overprotective schtick--seriously, he has one personality trait and it's telling violet not to do anything dangerous--while rhiannon, the token POC best friend, kicks ass.
violet takes xylon's advice and throws her knives at evil jack. i genuinely don't know why she doesn't kill him. apparently murder is fine, he's killed like 3 people onscreen, and she has good aim. just END him.
still not sure what violet's disorder is. her bones are apparently weak and so is all her connective tissue? osteopenia can be a symptom in some types but that doesn't seem consistent with violet's description of her symptoms. i'm curious to see if the author has specified what her diagnosis is.
so violet wins this fight by poisoning her opponent and then wins the next few by also poisoning them, as we find out in a quick two paragraphs of expo. this is a stupid and obvious plan. violet is literally on the breakfast crew. violet is bragging inwardly about having killed no one, which i guess is morally sound. she's poisoned and beaten 5 people. meanwhile 20 cadets have died on the mats.
again. what the fuck kind of military training is this.
after a page of timeskip violet walks into a fight to find she poisoned her opponent so hard they've been replaced by someone else for this match. WHOOPS.
and her opponent is xylon. welp.
NOTE: ok i looked it up and it looks like violet is supposed to have POTS and EDS. noted.