A Boy and His Dragon

A Boy and His Dragon (2013) R. Cooper

I was perusing ebooks on sale and came across an R Cooper fantasy romance. Then I saw that it was available from the library.

So I checked it out.

And then realized they didn’t have the kindle edition so I had to read it on my phone. (GRUMP)

Arthur MacArthur is in desperate need of a better paying job. Before Arthur dropped out of school to support his younger sister, he loved being a research assistant at the university, and becoming a personal assistant to a famous historian like Dr. Jones is a chance for Arthur to, sort of, live his dream again. But though Arthur was told Dr. Jones is a dragon, one of the most powerful and least understood of the beings, he didn’t anticipate what that could mean—or that he would be so immediately attracted to his boss.

I’ll be honest, I was quite wary of a dragon as one of the main romantic leads, for fear it would be… icky maybe?

Luckily it wasn’t.

The dragon initially appears in his dragon form, which is big, but maybe llama sized rather than elephant or jet plane sized (since the dragon can maneuver through the house.

Arthur is immediately attracted to his new boss, but he is just as attracted to the incredible library the man has–books of all types piled all over the place and in need of not just organization, but also dusting and care.

Bertie’s books were fascinating in their own right.

The first had been large and ambitious in a dissertation-gone-out-of-control kind of way, a sprawling exploration of the witch and werewolf hunts carried out by humans, mostly on other humans.

Being a romance, there is of course sexual tension, but because dragons and other Beings are very different, Arthur can’t tell if his boss is flirtatious or interested in him. And since Arthur desperately needs this job, he is terrified of doing anything to lose it.

Except, perhaps, yelling at Bertie about how terribly he treats his books.

Some of the things I liked best about the story were the glimpses into the cultures of the Beings, including looking at the history of dragons in human culture.

He’d come to the realization that stories about dragon slaying appeared most when cultures and dynasties were on the rise and needed to assert their strength and power.

It was a surprisingly sweet story–the two fell in love over the course of the story, there were communication issues where Arthur didn’t understand quite what Bertie was saying and vice versa, but the fact that Bertie was the boss and Arthur the assistant did make it reasonable (and indeed sensible) for neither to come out and say what they were feeling.

The bond between a dragon and its beloved, particularly when it chooses a human to live, is without a word in any tongue, ancient or modern. In fact, the dragons were convinced that to name it would be to cheapen it, for it was beyond value and to define it as we might attempt to do today would destroy it.

Parts of the story were clumsy (this is an earlier book of hers) and I wonder if the newly released version was re-edited to deal with some of the issues I noticed.

But mostly it was a nice distraction.
Rating: 7/10

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