Review: Scales and Sensibility or some fun in Regency Time… and dragons!

Hello everyone and happy Monday! I hope your week started in the best possible way! I am finally back with a review, so I can’t complain!

I received a copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Title: Scales and Sensibility
Series: Regency Dragons #1
Author: Stephanie Burgis
Pages: 307
Pubblication Date: October 4th, 2021

Sensible, practical Elinor Tregarth really did plan to be the model poor relation when she moved into Hathergill Hall. She certainly never meant to kidnap her awful cousin Penelope’s pet dragon. She never expected to fall in love with the shameless – but surprisingly sweet – fortune hunter who came to court Penelope. And she never dreamed that she would have to enter into an outrageous magical charade to save her younger sisters’ futures.
However, even the most brilliant scholars of 1817 England still haven’t ferreted out all the lurking secrets of rediscovered dragonkind…and even the most sensible of heroines can still make a reckless wish or two when she’s pushed. Now Elinor will have to find out just how rash and resourceful she can be when she sets aside all common sense. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll even be impractical enough to win her own true love and a happily ever after…with the unpredictable and dangerous “help” of the magical creature who has adopted her.
A frothy Regency rom-com full of pet dragons and magical misadventures, Scales and Sensibility is a full-length novel and the first in a new series of standalone romantic comedies.

I received a copy of this book from the author, and I was really really excited about it! First of all, I am a great fan of The Hardwood Spellbook series and I want to read more by this author (and continue that series, too, obviously!) because her MCs in that series are young determined women who try their best to reach their goal and to make the world around them a better place for everyone.
And then we have the title of this book. And the first line.

It was a truth universally acknowledged that any young lady without a dragon was doomed to social failure.

Both of them are Austen’s references and they are just brilliant. I just had to read a book called “Scales and Sensibility” because, really, how can you not??
And even the cover is pretty! And we have dragons!! You get why I was excited, right? And I devoured it!

Sure, this is not really a feat, because the book is not chunky, and it is quite fast-paced and captivating. And quite fun, too! But… But then my slump was on me and I didn’t write the review. I really wanted to, on one hand, but on the other, I couldn’t be bothered to take out my PC and write, so I am sorry for the delay. But, finally, here we are!!

This is a sort of regency romance, or at least we have also the romance here, and we get a lot of Regency tropes, that Burgis not only artfully deploy but she plays with them, too and with us, mocking both the tropes, the costumes and our expectations about all that. And there is the fantasy element too, with the dragons. She chooses to go about dragons in a peculiar way, and if on one hand, I was expecting something different because they are, generally speaking, a sort of glorified pets for rich girls, on the other hand, she manages to create something unique that slowly grew on me. And Sir Jessamyn is just too adorable!! So yes, even if in the beginning I was a bit skeptical about the dragons in there, it was short-lived, and in the end, I really enjoyed myself! 

We have also some interesting characters and an interesting plot. The characters are all a bit cliche-y, but it sits well with the overall atmosphere of the book: the author uses a lot of cliches everywhere, she plays with them and with us, and hence the characters are no exception. But they are all pretty good all the same. Sure the villains are all villains without redeeming qualities and without being really evil, they are all just spoiled and entitled, or greedy and conniving. And the good ones are pretty cliche-y too but in a good way. My favorite, Sir Jessamyn aside, was Mr. Aubrey, the scholar who lives in his own world. Sometimes he is more like a child than an adult, but it is all between the parameters of this kind of character, and he is, in his own way, adorable, at least most of the time.
To be completely honest I had some, minor, problems with Elinor, our main character. She is determined, she strongly knows what is right and what is wrong, and she tries her best to be a good person. And this is all well and good, but sometimes it’s like she is too good for her own good (I hope that this makes sense to you) and I would have preferred for all this goodness to be toned down a notch. She really has not a mean bone in her, and sometimes it was a bit much for me. But it wasn’t really a big concern, and I had quite a lot of fun reading this book.

So if you are in for a regency story with dragons and humor, well go no further!! 

and half!

And what about you? Have you read this book? Or others by this author?? Let me know!!

Happy reading!
S.