REVIEW - SONG OF THE DRAGON RIDER - THE DRAGONS BALLAD BY KARINA ESPINOSA

  

Title: Song Of The Dragon Rider
Series: The Dragons Ballad
Author: Karina Espinosa
Genre: Fantasy, Romatasy, Time Travel
Release Date: 18th April 2025

BLURB
My life's taken a dive straight into an episode of "Game of Thrones"—minus the cool graphics. Here I am, Cat, Hollywood stunt double turned unwilling guest in Damien Drakonar's dragon-infested soap opera. Yep, that Damien—the hot, broody dragon shifter prince who's as infuriating as he is mysterious. And guess what? He's decided to keep me around because of some cosmic joke involving twin flame marks. Apparently, we're destined to be together—talk about a plot twist!

As I try to wrap my head around our supposed bond, this little secret of ours doesn't stay quiet for long. We've got a traitor in our midst, causing more trouble than a season finale of your favorite reality TV series. Now, every step I take in Damien's world draws me closer to him. My heart, that traitorous little thing, seems to forget I'm more into Netflix and chill than fire and brimstone.

Caught between a return ticket to my comfy old life and the fiery gaze of a man who's equal parts danger and allure, I've got decisions to make. With alliances shifting like sand beneath my feet, it's hard to tell friends from enemies. Will I ever zip back to my world, or will Damien's world—with its dark charm and hidden threats—become my new norm? As we face the ultimate showdown, I have to Can love truly conquer all, or am I just playing a part in a story that might not get a sequel? 

Goodreads Link 

REVIEW
The book cover fits well with book one and definitely fits the “olde worlde” world of Elaria very well too.

The book picks up with Cat extremely annoyed that Damien “rescued” her from her attempt to find the portal to return her home by jumping in the River Elaria during a lightening storm. Lightening storms are supposed to be the times when the portals between worlds are open and active. Now Cat has no idea when the next storm will occur or how she will access the portal with Damien threatening to keep her on the island with him so she cannot leave him. Damien has yet to reveal the full importance of the twin flame and the real reasons he needs her to stay with him. Cat manages to cajole him into allowing her to go back to the Ryder Residence, reasoning her absence would cause more issues.

Damien, Lady Arya/Cat & Prince Thorne meet to discuss a way of stopping the vampires. A plan is made and carried out, though it turns out not everything goes as planned.
Maeve continues to help Cat be “Lady Arya” helping her dress and act the part to avoid raising suspicions of anyone in the Ryder home.

Theres a lot going on at the Ryder Residence with the return of the son Jacob who has been serving in the Emperors Army. Maeve, Cats servant has a rather large crush on Jacob and is delighted he is home. There are other changes at the Ryder residence, it seems that Gianna has suddenly found favour with her father over Cat/Lady Arya.

Jacob chooses to take Lady Arya/Cat to the Emperors event to celebrate the return of his army. Unfortunately, Prince Julian is still looking to get back at Lady Arya/Cat for getting the better of him at their last meeting, where Lady Arya/Cat fought back and Uncle Bai also intervened. This time Prince Julian ends up temporarily getting the upper hand, by ordering his servant to continually slap Jacob across the face as a punishment for Lady Arya/Cat.

After the incident at the event welcoming the Emperors Army home, the Emperor speaks to Cat/Lady Arya’s father. Lord Ryder orders that Cat/Lady Arya is given lashes to teach her a lesson. Jacob rushes to the garden where the flogging is taking place and manages to talk their father into allowing Lady Arya/Cat to have a healer attend her. Lady Arya/Cat refuses and insists she wants only the Warlock Garrick to attend to her. Garrick arrives and though he agrees to help he informs her there could be some lasting side effects.

We also learn what the real Lady Arya as Cat in the modern world has been coping…..lets say it isn’t very well! She has been in a coma for a month and wakes up in a hospital, something totally alien to her and a stark contrast to her own world. Everything is new and weird to Lady Arya in Cat’s world from the hospital, then the “metal contraption” aka the car that Angie picks her up from the hospital to take her to her/Cat’s home. Though she does have the help of Cat’s best friend Angie to navigate it all, even though she tends to treat Angie as she would treat Maeve in her own world. Lady Arya as Cat deals with Cats cheating ex-boyfriend Fernando and splits up with him and sends him packing which was hilarious to read. Lady Arya certainly put Fernando in his place and out of Cat’s life! Theres quite a comedic “friendship” building between Lady Arya and Angie.
I loved the increasingly familiar and romantic relationship between Cat and Damien. I enjoyed their escapade and Dargon & Dragon Rider and hope we get more of that. I felt horror and sorrow for the poor girl singing the Song Of The Dragon Rider at the Emperors event.

When I was reading book one, I longed for an insight as to what was happening with Lady Arya in the modern world. Sadly, I found Lady Arya in the modern world quite irritating, though I guess that means she lived up to the descriptions of her from Elaria and her interaction with Fernando was amusing/ I did find myself disappointed when it was her POV chapters and eager to get back to chapters from POV of Damien & Cat. Having said that by the end of the book I was warming to Lady Arya a little more. I guess I preferred the Damien & Cats POV as I am more invested in their part of the story as I am more familiar with it too.

Throughout this book both Cat and Damien are told to be careful of whom they trust and when they realise who has betrayed them it does shock them both! I have to admit I was quite distrusting of this person already so, yep I sniffed out the “wrong ‘un”. I could really “go off on one” about this character and how evil they seem to be underneath the veneer they initially present to Elaria. They certainly do not deserve to succeed in their plan. Lets hope Cat and Damien come up with a counter plan fairly quickly, as it won’t only be the end of their budding romantic relationship, it will be the end of Cat’s chances of getting home!
I’m intrigued to find out who the “real father” is too. Though I won’t say whose and give too anything away!

My immediate thoughts were Oooo, more secrets revealed & betrayals unearthed in this instalment of The Dragons Ballad. It appears that both Damien & Cat need to be very careful whom they choose to trust & allow into their inner circle of growing power so that it will not be stifled.

Summing up, I’m looking forward to the conclusion even though I’m not entirely sure how I want it to end. Part of me wants a happy ever ending with Damien and Cat whether that’s them together either in Elaria or somehow in the modern world. Then I wonder how that will that look for Lady Arya in the modern world. So many scenarios to deal with! How will it all come together in one final book!!!

 

 

BLOG TOUR - MIDNIGHT IN SOAP LAKE BY MATTHEW SULLIVAN

  

Title: Midnight In Soap Lake
Author: Matthew Sullivan
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Release Date: 15th April 2025 

 
BLURB
A lake with mysterious properties. A town haunted by urban legend. Two women whose lives intersect in terrifying ways. Welcome to Soap Lake, a town to rival Twin Peaks and Stephen King’s Castle Rock.

When Abigail agreed to move to Soap Lake, Washington for her husband’s research she expected old growth forests and craft beer, folksy neighbors and the World’s Largest Lava Lamp. Instead, after her husband jets off to Poland for a research trip, she finds herself alone, in a town surrounded by desert, and haunted by its own urban legends.

But when a young boy runs through the desert into Abigail’s arms, her life becomes entwined with his and the questions surrounding his mother Esme’s death. In Abigail’s search for answers she enlists the help of a recovering addict-turned-librarian, a grieving brother, a broken motel owner, and a mentally-shattered conspiracy theorist to unearth Esme’s tragic past, the town’s violent history, and the secret magic locked in the lake her husband was sent there to study.

As she gets closer to the answers, past and present crimes begin to collide, and Abigail finds herself gaining the unwelcome attention of the town’s unofficial mascot, the rubber-suited orchard stalker known as TreeTop, a specter who seems to be lurking in every dark shadow and around every shady corner.

A sweeping, decade-spanning mystery brimming with quirky characters, and puzzle hunt scenarios, Midnight in Soap Lake is a modern day Twin Peaks—a rich, expansive universe that readers will enter and never forget.

 
PURCHASE LINKS
HarperCollins
BookShop.org
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Sullivan is the beloved author of Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, an Indie Next Pick, B&N Discover pick, a GoodReads Choice Award finalist and winner of the Colorado Book Award. He received his MFA from the University of Idaho and has been a resident writer at Yaddo, Centrum, and the Vermont Studio Center. His short stories have been awarded the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize and the Florida Review Editors’ Award for Fiction. His writing has been featured in the New York Times Modern Love column, The Daily Beast, and Shelf Awareness amongst others.

AUTHOR LINKS
Author Website

Instagram
Facebook
Goodreads

 

EXCERPT 

1

Abigail

 

            Something was there.

An animal, Abigail was certain, loping in the sagebrush: a twist of fuzz moving through the desert at the edge of her sight. The morning had already broken a hundred. Her glasses steamed and sunscreen stung her eyes—

Or maybe she hadn’t seen anything.

Yesterday, while walking along this desolate irrigation road, she’d spotted a cow skull between tumbleweeds, straight out of a tattoo parlor, but when she ran toward it, bracing to take a picture to send to Eli across the planet—proof, perhaps, that she ever left the house—she discovered it was just a white plastic grocery bag snagged on a curl of sage bark.

Somehow. Way out here.

The desert was scabby with dark basalt, bristled with the husks of flowers, and nothing was ever there.

When Eli first told her he’d landed a grant to research a rare lake in the Pacific Northwest, Abigail thought ferns and rain, ale and slugs, Sasquatch and wool.

And then they got here, to this desert where no one lived. Not a fern or slug in sight.

This had been the most turbulent year of her life.

Eleven months ago, they met.

Seven months ago, they married.

Six months ago, they moved from her carpeted condo in Denver to this sunbaked town on the shores of Soap Lake, a place where neither knew a soul.

Their honeymoon had lasted almost three months—Eli whistling in his downstairs lab, Abigail unpacking and painting upstairs—and then he kissed her at the airport, piled onto a plane, and moved across the world to work in a different lab, on a different project, at a different lake.

In Poland.

When she remembered him lately, she remembered photographs of him.

The plan had been to text all the time, daily calls, romantic flights to Warsaw, but the reality was that Eli had become too busy to chat and seemed more frazzled than ever. This week had been particularly bad because he’d been off the grid on a research trip, so every call went to voicemail, every text into the Polish abyss. And then at five o’clock this morning, her phone pinged and Abigail shot right out of a drowning sleep to grab it, as if he’d tossed her a life preserver from six thousand miles away.

And this is what he’d had to say:

 

sorry missed you. so much work & my research all fd up. i’ll call this weekend. xo e

 

As she was composing a response—her phone the only glow in their dark, empty home—he added a postscript that stabbed her in the heart like an icicle.

P.S. maybe it time since remember using time to figure out self life?

 

What kind of a sentence was that? And what was a “self life” anyway?

Abigail had called him right away. When he didn’t pick up she went down to the lab he’d set up in their daylight basement. She opened a few of his binders with their charts of Soap Lake, their colorful DNA diagrams, their photos of phosphorescent microbes, as cosmic as images from deep space. She breathed the papery dust of his absence and tried to imagine he’d just stepped out for a minute and would be back in a flash, her clueless brilliant husband, pen between his teeth, hair a smoky eruption, mustard stains on the plaid flannel bathrobe he wore in place of a lab coat.

From one of his gleaming refrigerators, Abigail retrieved a rack of capped glass tubes that contained the Miracle Water and the Miracle Microbes collected from the mineral lake down the hill— she sometimes wondered if her limnologist husband would be more at home on the shores of Loch Ness—and held one until a memory arose, like a visit from a friend: Eli, lifting a water sample up to the window as if he were gazing through a telescope, shaking it so it fizzed and foamed. And then he was gone again.

She hated that she did this. Came down here and caressed his equipment like a creep. Next she’d be smelling his bathrobe, collecting hairs from his brush. It was as if she felt compelled to remind herself that Eli was doing important work and, as the months of distance piled up, that he was even real.

Back when they’d first started dating, Abigail had been the busy one, the one who said yes to her boss too much and had to skim her calendar each time Eli wanted to go to dinner or a movie. Of course her job as an administrative assistant in a title insurance office had never felt like enough, but when she mentioned this restlessness to Eli, finding her path—figure out self life—had suddenly become a centerpiece of their move to Soap Lake. But they got here and nothing had happened. It wasn’t just a switch you flipped.

Abigail slid the tall tube of lake water back into its rack. Only when she let go, the tube somehow missed its slot and plunged to the floor like a bomb.

Kapow!

On the tile between her feet, a blossom of cloudy water and shattered glass.

She stood over the mess, clicking her fingernails against her teeth and imagining microbes squealing on the floor, flopping in the air like miniscule goldfish. She told herself, without conviction, it had been an accident.

And then she stepped over the spill, put the rack back in the fridge and, surprised at the immediacy of her shame, went for a walk in this scorching desert.

It stunned her, how harsh and gorgeous it was.

Loneliness: it felt sometimes like it possessed you.

She hadn’t spoken to anyone in over a month, outside of a few people in the Soap Lake service industry. There was the guy who made her a watery latte at the gas station the other morning, then penised the back of her hand with his finger when he passed it over. And the newspaper carrier, an old woman with white braids and a pink cowgirl hat, who raced through town in a windowless minivan. She told Abigail she was one DUI away from unemployment, but the weekly paper was never late. And the cute pizza delivery dude who was so high he sat in her driveway on his phone for half an hour before coming to the door with her cold cheese pizza, saying, Yes, ma’am. Thanks, ma’am, which was sweet but totally freaked her out. And the lady with the painted boomerang eyebrows in the tampon aisle at the grocery store who gave her unwanted advice on the best lube around for spicing up menopause, to which Abigail guffawed and responded too loudly, “Thanks, but I’m not even goddamned forty!”

At least she’d discovered these maintenance roads: miles and miles of gravel and dirt, no vehicles allowed, running alongside the massive irrigation canals that brought Canadian snowmelt from the Columbia River through the Grand Coulee Dam to the farms spread all over this desert. The water gushed through the main canals, thirty feet wide and twenty feet deep, and soon branched off to other, smaller canals that branched off to orchards and fields and ranches and dairies and soil and seeds and sprouts and leaves and, eventually, yummy vital food: grocery store shelves brimming with apples and milk and pizza-flavored Pringles.

Good soil. Blazing sun. Just add water and food was born.

Almost a trillion gallons a year moved through these canals. T: trillion.

All that water way out here, pouring through land so dry it crackled underfoot.

She halted on the road. Pressed her lank, brown hair behind her ear. Definitely heard something, a faint yip or caw.

She scanned the horizon for the source of the sound and there it was again, a smudge of movement in the wavering heat. Something running away.

A few times out here she’d seen coyote. Lots of quail, the occasional pheasant. Once, in a fallow field close to town, a buck with a missing antler that looked from a distance like a unicorn.

Not running away, the smudge out there. Running toward. She was nowhere near a signal yet her instinct was to touch her phone. She craned around to glimpse the vanishing point of the road behind, gauging how far she’d walked and, if things got bad, how far she’d have to run.

Three miles, minimum. Six miles, tops.

Definitely approaching.

Not something. Someone.

A human. Alone.

Running. A boy.

A little boy. Sprinting.

Abigail froze as their eyes met, and suddenly the boy exploded out of the desert, slamming into her thighs with an oof! He wore yellow pajamas and Cookie Monster slippers covered in prickly burrs.

He clung to her legs so tightly that she almost tipped over. When she registered the crusty blood on his chin and cheeks and encasing his hands like gloves, she felt herself begin to cry, scared-to-sobbing in one second flat.

Deep breath. Shirt wipe.

“Hey! Are you hurt? Look at me. Are you hurt?”

The boy wasn’t crying, but his skin was damp and he was panting hot and wouldn’t let go of her legs. She felt a hummingbird inside of his chest.

She knelt in the gravel and unfolded his arms, turning them over at the wrist. She lifted his shirt and spun him around as best she could. He had some welts and scratches from running through the brush, and the knees of his pj’s were badly scuffed, but he wasn’t cut, not anywhere serious, which meant— The blood belonged to someone else.

 

Excerpted from MIDNIGHT IN SOAP LAKE by Matthew Sullivan. Copyright © 2025 by Matthew Sullivan. Published by Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HTP/HarperCollins.