Dragonshadow: 3 reasons it may be the best Jane Austen-inspired sequel

Apparently, dragons are exactly what you need to make a Jane Austen retelling work, or at least that’s what Dragonstone posits.

With the cold settling in this week, Dragonshadow from Elle Katharine White is coming in at basically the perfect time — and no, that’s not just because it still has the Pride-&-Prejudice romantic flavor to make curling up with a book worth it. Yes, this is the sequel to Heartstone, which surprised this reviewer last year.

Overall, though, Dragonshadow is a more mature book, and it also happens to be a good fantasy on its own, even without the inevitable comparisons to its source material.

But those comparisons are inevitable, and so it’s time to talk about why this one stands out over some of the others we’ve seen.

A portrait of a marriage

There are plenty of Pride & Prejudice sequels out there, focusing on what Darcy and Elizabeth’s marriage would look like, and quite a few of them are particularly frothy and tend to interact with the class issues on a surface level.

Dragonshadow, however, dives deep. Are there still newlywed-type moments between Alastair and Aliza? Absolutely, and they provide sweet counterpoints to the heavier plot points. But these are two people who, as Aliza points out in the novel, didn’t even really get along so well when they first met, and they’re now married. That’s a huge step, and although they love each other, that doesn’t mean that marriage is perfectly easy all the time.

Really, White deserves kudos on two levels for this move, because not only does she avoid breaking them up in any meaningful way, she also doesn’t delay the wedding. Granted, Aliza probably couldn’t have participated in the plot at all if she weren’t married, but it’s still a good choice. Letting the relationship be stable means that there’s room for tension in other areas, and it ends up being a better character choice in that it shows us different sides of our main characters.

Wider lore

Way back when this reviewer took on Heartstone, I noted that White has a particularly good grasp on mythological creatures, but that takes a step forward here. Now that she’s married to one of the foremost Riders in the kingdom, Aliza has a lot to learn about the creatures who share Arle with humans, but for the most part, the additional information we get is added in naturally, with White pointedly not going too deep when Aliza does do some research at points.

However, White also wrestles, however briefly, with the consequences of their fame. Aliza and Alastair (and particularly Alastair) are the subjects of songs at this point. People know their names; people know the events of the first book. In a sense, this is a story about legends who are still in the process of becoming legends, and while this isn’t explored fully in this book, one imagines that come book three, there might be some more ramifications to play with. It has stepped beyond just “Pride & Prejudice but with dragons.”

Emotional resonance

When discussing Dragonshadow with a friend, I said that this book hurt my heart, which is a much more colloquial way of saying that it absolutely goes for — and for the most part nails — some particularly heavy things. (It’s a spoiler, but I’d like to provide a content warning for discussion of miscarriage.)

In fact, the book as a whole feels darker, and that’s not just because of the deep blue cover. Even the main story at hand deals with some complex ideas about what love looks like and what it can drive some people to do in order to keep it. This isn’t to say that Heartstone didn’t have some weighty topics, but Dragonshadow is a step forward not just for the world at hand but for White as a writer.

Dragonshadow is on sale now.