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This was fun! This reminded me a lot of being younger and growing up online in fan communities, and then being super awkward in my offline life, haha. I'm apparently only a few years older than Cath too, based on her saying 9/11 happened in 3rd grade.

This is a coming-of-age story for Cath, twin sister to Wren, as the two of them move from Omaha to Lincoln to attend UNL. I bought the book because it was local and it sounded fun, even though it's outside my usual genre. Cath and Wren grew up as huge Simon Snow fans and would write/post fanfiction together. As they enter college, Wren is ready to put that childishness aside and enter the party college life, but Cath isn't.

I appreciate that even when Cath is obviously wrong and just being driven by emotions/anxiety/etc, we get into her head to understand that. A fair number of books I've read in the last couple of years had authors who seemed to forget you can do that, so it's refreshing to read this one. Some of her anxieties are ones that I relate to and her friends are there to help her figure out how to navigate the real world. Love all the characters.

Small complaint: It was weird that Levi eventually mentions "Harry Potter" when Simon Snow is obviously a stand-in for Harry Potter. It's kind of a double-take moment since it feels like we agreed that this is a world where Simon Snow is Harry Potter, and now brings up the question of what's Potter's place in the world? It only comes up once though so it's easy to forget.

This is described on the back of the book as Moby Dick, but instead of whalers, it's about drachenjagers (dragon hunters) traversing the Cloudmere in their magic crystal-levitated ships. Much like whaling, dragon hunting is dangerous business. And much like Moby Dick, here a jager captain's crew was struck with tragedy when a monstrous dragon of myth known as Gargantuan, aka the Black Leviathan, attacks his crew and kills nearly everyone on board. The bulk of the story takes place five years later and follows Lian, a young man studying krillian (magic crystal) carving, who suddenly finds himself in a bind and has to flee his home.

This book is exactly what I love about dragons. Powerful, mysterious monsters that aren't fully understood. They're dangerous, they need to be taken seriously, they're not talking ridable pets. (Unless you have the mettle and sheer force of will to tame one. But they're still beasts.) They're not friends, they're not magically bound to humans and telepathic with them. They can be tamed, but it's more akin to taming a tiger.

The pacing is good, there's very little downtime and time wasting fluff. Lots of fun dragon fights and other exciting things happen. Entertaining the whole way through. I haven't read Moby Dick so I don't actually know just how close it is in terms of story beats to that, but as its own story, it's very good. A perfect book for me.