Méka is back in her homeland after 10 long years. She has come to perform her birthright, but of course the current occupying force has to have their say. Méka enlists the help of an unlikely partner and together they set off on the perilous jouney.
This story is perfect for dragon lovers. The Mountain Crown is a breathtaking work of fiction. I love when I have to work at reading. The writing in this book is beautiful and I love how focused you have to be to glean meaning from each sentence. Karin Lowachee has crafted an intricate world and characters in so few pages, and I am in awe. There are so many books featuring characters who communicate with dragons, but The Mountain Crown makes that connection between Méka, Raka and the dragons feel bone deep. The author has created an immersive reading experience with this novella and I cannot wait until the next one.

I wish I had liked this book more! While I’ve praised other books recently for guiding me through the basic world building with a light touch, I felt lost when it came to the dragon-speak. I never felt like I was understanding the tone or emotion behind what the dragons were saying. Additionally, the history and the setting itself were super interesting, but something about the pacing felt off to me - more like this was the first act of the story as opposed to the first book in the series. But all that aside, any dragon book gets at least three stars from me!

**Thanks to Netgalley for the eARC and the chance to read this novella early! **

I went into this novella knowing exactly one thing: dragons. And honestly, I got me some dragons! Overall, this didn't take me long to read at all, which I love; I honestly wish more authors would dabble in novellas and give us bite-sized stories to explore worlds in, because I find it fascinating.

As for this story itself, I did enjoy it. I think the characters and the world building weren't quite clear enough from the word go - we did get more clarification around the mid point and the end, but this gave the epic fantasy feeling of being dropped into a world and being told "okay have fun!" with no real direction or point of clarity. I wish that the MC Meka's goal was outlined just a bit clearer by herself or the narration, because whatever bit we did get of it was muddied by the kind of clunky and bad writing of the dialogue and narration of this book. But, once I got into the story, i understood mostly what was going on, which was great.

Things I liked: The dragons, mostly. I didn't super love them being equated with horse-like animals, simply because the dragons that live in my head are incredibly intelligent beings, but that's on me, not on the book.
I also really liked the concept of the connection between the MC's people and the dragons, and I hope we get to see that explored in future books.

What didn't work for me: the writing. my god was it clunky?? There were half sentences throughout the book, badly done descriptions that felt so uneven and off in my head, and my god was the dialogue TOUGH to read. It didn't feel natural at all, which made the reading experience a bit hard - and when the emotional beats hit, I didn't really do anything more than go "oh okay" and continue on because the writing was keeping me from truly connecting with the characters and the story. I wish that I could have turned off my editor brain to get through this and just enjoy the story, because the story was definitely the strong suit, but the way it was told to me was just not it for me.

it literally ends on an incomplete sentence, which made me just laugh.

Despite all of that, it gets a lower four star rating because the ideas and the world and the core of the story was good enough to keep it going for me. I hope that the next book is better, and that we get to explore this world and the dragons more!

3.5 stars rounded up.

This is a very unique start to a series about indigenous people forced from their lands and the dragons they lived in harmony with by war. The story understands that it's a novella and spends no time infodumping, instead trusting the audience to make inferences and come to an understanding with the minimum amount of explanation. The prose is also very present and lyrical. I really appreciated being treated like an adult who can put pieces together on my own...

...except for when something happens with the "magic" in this book around the 75% mark. I wish there was more signalling as to what "magic" can do in this world before that point, because up until then I was led to believe that these indigenous people had extra sensory perception that allowed them to connect to nature, each other, and dragons in a way that the other types of humans couldn't, but nope. There's actual magic and I don't understand it. The story fell apart for me after this point, although I mostly understood why the things that happened occurred.

Ultimately, this wasn't a story for me but I hope it gets a lot of attention. Thank you so much to NetGalley and Rebellion Publishing for this ARC!

Un style original et unique et un worldbuilding dense et passionnant, voilà une belle bouffée d'air frais au milieu du regain d'intérêt pour les dragons.

Dans The Mountain Crown On suit Meka, une Ba'Suon, qui retourne sur ses terres ancestrales dont son peuple a été en partie chassé pour prélever un suon, un dragon et le ramener auprès de son clan. Mais évidemment, les convoitises de ceux qui n'hésitent pas à asservir les suon vont quelque peu changer ses plans alors qu'elle trouvera des alliés inattendus sur sa route.

En une centaine de page The Mountain Crown amène un lore fascinant où dragons et spiritualités sont liés. J'ai adoré la manière dont communiquent les suon avec les Ba'Suon, même si cela rend parfois la lecture complexe. Il faut parfois un peu de patience ou d'attention, la langue n'est pas la plus accessible, mais quel regal.

J'ai adoré évidemment la dénonciation du colonialisme, opposant de manière classique une société d'oppresseurs déconnectés du monde naturel et des natifs qui le respectent. J'ai vraiment senti un coté western et en même temps avec une touche asiatique qui rendait l'univers vraiment unique. Les personnages campés avec soin, uniques dans leurs voix, donnent vraiment envie de lire la suite pour pouvoir creuser leurs zones d'ombres, même si ce premier volume se suffit techniquement à lui-même.

Un récit complexe, un univers fascinant et original, un propos engagé, il ne m'en faut pas plus pour me convaincre de suivre avec attention le reste de la série !

Meka is on her way to catch a king dragon, but before her journey really even gets started, she is finding herself in trouble with the local law.

Meka can communicate with the dragons, but the way the communicate is hard to understand at times and by the end of the book I just found it annoying. Her people have a fragile treaty with the Kattakans and in order to get a dragon and get back home she must have her papers. The sheriff took them from her, and to get them back she must bring him a king dragon. To cause her even more trouble, he also sends along a man who is supposed to work for him to ensure she brings the dragon back to him, which she has no intention of doing, but we only find that out at the end. Meka just kind of goes along with everything until the end.

Through the whole journey Meka is trying to get Raka to turn against the sheriff and rejoin his people. I never really understood why it mattered so much to her, and I didn’t get the relationship Raka had with the other men who he supposedly betrayed.

I really enjoyed the start of this book, but halfway through it started to drag and I got lost with what was going on and what the main point of the story was. The ending was cool, but it didn’t feel satisfying, and I’m left with more questions than answers.

This book is just so dang cool.

The Plot
The Mountain Crown follows Méka as she travels to the Crown Mountains to gather a king suon (dragon). As a Ba’Suon, she sees the world a little differently, and has an empathetic connection to both suon and the natural world.

To gather a king, however, she must enter Kattakan towns and countryside, the people who drove Méka’s people from their homelands and do not want her people to succeed. As she travels she finds Lilley, a Kattakan veteran who fought with the Ba’Suon in the war, turned slave. After buying his freedom and the freedom of the dragon with him, the town’s Lord forces Ba’Suon traitor Raka to travel with the two and ensure Méka brings a king suon for the town’s consumption before she gathers one to help her people’s herd. It is a dangerous journey, and Méka must make sense of Lilley (who is Kattakan but acts Ba’Suon) and Raka (who is Ba’Suon but acts Kattakan), her dream that sent her on this mission in the first place, and the world around her.

What I Liked:
This book does dragons in such a unique and awe-inspiring way. I loved the empathetic connection that the Ba’Suon had with each other and the suon.

The themes of colonialism, family, and balance of good vs. evil in the world were exceptionally well done and thought provoking.

The pacing of this novella is top tier- everything moved at just the right pace and I never found myself wanting more or less from any scene.

The characters, the world, the suon, the fact that this says “Book One” on the front - I am in love with everything. Will be buying once this comes out, perhaps to annotate, and I look forward to more stories in this world!

Interesting read. I liked the cultural elements around the dragons. Didn't fully connect with the characters which is why it was 4 stars but I haven't read anything that quite touched on the same feelings of living amongst dragons as this book did.

We’re living in a new golden age of SFF novellas, and Karin Lowachee’s latest fantasy offering is one of the standouts. THE MOUNTAIN CROWN serves up a layered, immersive introduction to a world distorted by colonization and peopled with characters shaped by both tradition and circumstance.

The more I think about this book, the more I like it. It strikes the perfect balance between subtle and direct. A lot goes unvoiced, but never unsaid, and while there may be a few easy answers out there, there are no easy solutions. Lowachee digs into how the physical, environmental, and cultural trauma her characters endure impacts everything about how they see the world and negotiate their place in it. And she does it all within a 150-page story about a journey through a frontier in an attempt to bond with dragons.

Highly recommended. I can’t wait for the next novella in the Crowns of Iskia sequence.

What I enjoyed most about this book was the descriptive writing style. The world building was great and I could really imagine the whole scenery.
The plot itself was alright, but pretty much predictable. It also felt like things were happening too fast and too sudden sometimes.
The characters were fine, but I couldn’t really find a connection to any of them and wished to find out a little bit more about their backstories. Something I would have loved to be described with a little bit more detail as well is the way the main character was able to communicate with the dragons.
Overall this book had a good ground structure but couldn’t stand out to me.

Pretty decent dragon book. It was fast paced, had great dragons, complex characters, and was a fun read. Honestly, it got me out of a slump and gave me Eragon vibes, which is what I wanted. Probably going to pick a copy up for my dad, I feel like he would really vibe with it.

I struggled to push through this book but despite my best intentions I gave up at the 50% mark.
The premise sounded interesting but the execution didn't click with me at all.
This was a case of style over substance. The writing is difficult to follow. It reminded me a bit of Marlon James's style in The Dark Star Trilogy but nowhere near as succesful. The MC communicates with the dragons in a way that I found at first difficult to understand and later just annoying. The cast of characters is not very big, but still I couldn't connect with any of them. In fact I felt completely disengaged from everything that was going on. Half way through this and I still couldn't understand what was the main plot.
Maybe it's my fault and readers familiar with the author's writing style will like it, but for everyone else I suggest reading a sample first.
My thanks to NetGalley and Rebellion Publishing for this Arc.

I was wary yet intrigued by The Mountain Crown--mostly because of my general reaction to The Gaslight Dogs, which was brilliant but also a frustrating and emotionally devastating read. (As one would expect about a book about imperialism, entitlement and colonialism. Note: It was very well-written, and basically turned the White Savior concept inside out and then crapped on it--which was a delight, don't get me wrong--but still devastating.)

The Mountain Crown has a somewhat similar set up, in that it takes place in a setting with colonial/imperialistic invaders and natives who are treated as second or third class citizens in their own land. This time around, the natives tame and manage dragons. Or they would would be able to do this more effectively--because you really don't want a population explosion of a predator roughly the size of and elephant--if the invader Kattakan hadn't driven most of them off their land, and forced the remainder to work for them in one way or another.

The Ba'suon have an ability to communicate with dragons. (And a few other implied magical abilities.) Our Protagonist is a young woman named Méka whose traveled all the way from the country where her family has been exiled in order to "gather" a dragon. Unfortunately for her, the local Kattakan lord of the city she arrives in takes her permits and coerces her into hunting a dragon for him. (A dragon that will be slaughtered or forced to fight and then slaughtered.) This is not an ideal situation, but Meka is determined to find a way to get the job done and hopefully save the dragon from the butcher shop.

She's joined on this mission by Lilley, a slave whose freedom she buys. Lilley, despite being Kattakan has some latent ability to communicate with dragons, and is familiar with Ba'suon customs. (His parents were slaves who fled to Méka's part of the world. Unfortunately the Kattakan expanded into and invaded Ba'suon lands, so Lilley was eventually conscripted as a soldier, and then ended up in slavery anyway.) She is also joined by one of the Kattakan lord's men--a Ba'suon man named Raka, who has apparently decided to make his anger, trauma and grief everyone else's problem. Raka also has some extremely bad blood with Lilley which makes for insane levels of hostility that Méka has to mediate.

This book has some fascinating world building in regards to the dragons--who are called suon by the Ba'suon. The feel I got was somewhere between Anne McCaffrey's "dragons as horses," and Jane Yolen's "dragons being used as entertainment/bloodsport." That is, in some respects the dragons are "horses" and even come in horse-like scale patterns. (One of the dragons featured is a "piebald.") Dragons form packs or herds referred to as "crowns" (If I'm getting that part right) and are led by a "king" dragon, who is extremely territorial and dangerous.

The action and interaction between characters is solidly written, and the prose tends toward the poetic. (This is not a bad thing, but may make it slightly confusing if you aren't accustomed to lovely but indirect descriptions and allusive language.) Méka is an interesting Protagonist, with an inner strength that feels immovable even when she's in extremely dangerous situations. Both Lilley and Raka are interesting secondary characters, their interwoven backstory and growing relationship with Méka. This was an extremely interesting book and I would like to see more in this setting.
This review was based on a Galley received from NetGalley.

This was a brilliantly fresh take on dragons. Through Méka we see the wonder of them and learn how the Ba'suon will cooperate and bond with them. We can feel the horror she does at how these creatures how treated by the occupying Kattakan people. The suon don't speak the same way humans do, but the short sentences were able to clearly convey their emotions, whether pain, grief, or joy and I really liked it.

This is a great conversation on colonialism that puts focus on multiple perspectives. Méka and her family left their historical land and Kattakan rule for a neighbouring country years ago, but not all Ba'suon did, and there is a really good exploration of both their shared culture and how their different experiences shape their opinions.

There's a lot of brilliant character work and I quickly got invested in all three of the main trio, which only made the ending more emotional.
This was action-packed and wonderfully paced. There were some bits of dialogue that felt repetative toward the start but nothing that took away from the story.

I'm really excited to see what happens in the next in the series!

The Mountain Crown is a must read novella in the genre of fantasy and adventure. It is short but packs a punch.

✔️Fast paced
✔️Dragons

The author keeps readers engaged from start to finish. It is a fast read. The character development was great for such a short book.

This novella excels in its world-building and pacing. And as someone who devours books with dragons, this book satisfied in many ways. Meka is a fantastic FMC. It is a great addition to the fantasy world and I am looking forward to the next one.

Thank you to NetGalley and Rebellion for the Arc of this wonderful novella.

I've loved Lowachee's writing for years, and this was no exception. The world-building and character building were top-notch. The story had the feel of an almost Western setting (Weird West, maybe? Considering the inclusion of dragons). My only complaint is that the pacing was a little inconsistent, but that could be because of the need to condense the story into novella-length. Overall, a very exciting start to a new series and one that I'm looking forward to reading more of.

This was such a unique story with 150 pages of wonderful world building, mysterious pasts, and gripping action. I loved the culture and magic system that Lowachee created and I’m looking forward to checking out the next book in the series.

I'm not quite sure what it was that I just read but I really enjoyed it! Not at all what I expected, but all the better for it.

This was one of the most unique takes on dragons I've seen for a long while, which instantly made me really enjoy it. Though dragons seem to be having a resurgence of late, there are frustratingly few stories that try to do something new with them, but they were wonderful here.

Lowachee's writing is also gorgeous and it made me feel really immersed in the world. Despite the short page count, the atmosphere created was incredible. I loved the exploration of the Ba'suon culture, limited though it was, and the sheer vastness and unfathomableness (is that a word?) of the magic and connection to the suon (dragons) and the natural world. The bond between suon and rider was just so heartwarming. I also loved hearing the dragons' thoughts- alien and strange yet with clear meaning. The lyricism meant that the magic in particular was sometimes a bit hard to understand, but I think that contributed to the wonder of it. It's magic after all- I shouldn't expect to understand it!

I also really liked the characters. Again, despite the short page count, Lowachee really established them in a way that felt real and grounded. I realise now that I don't actually know a huge amount about them, but I feel as if I really do.

My only complant would be the short page count! I just want to spend more time in this universe with the suon. I'll definitely be picking up the sequel when it comes out.

I had a blast reading this book, mainly because of the dragons! The writing style was impressive, though the pacing could be improved since I prefer fast-paced narratives. I quickly connected with the well-developed characters. Overall, I enjoyed the plot and am eager to see where the story goes in the next books!

I think this book had a lot of potential, but with no chapter division and a bit of a confusing timeline, it got kind of lost in translation to some degree. The characters have a great setup for them that goes seemingly nowhere and while it has potential to be a great story, a few adjustments need to be made in order to provide the reader with a smoother experience.