Beta Lyrae

This is the third Heartstrikers book, and probably my favorite—I love Chelsie's development, the new stuff with F-clutch, and Conrad's moment. I'm less into Marci's subplot, but that would be because Julius's is so much my thing.

There might be spoilers for book four below; I think I cut the most blatant ones, but there might still be something.


I always forget how little time this book covers. It starts the day after last book, that evening is the first vote, the second is two days later… Several times Bob or Amelia says that it isn't as though X will happen tomorrow, and then it does indeed happen tomorrow. Which they would know.

I had also forgotten all of the scheming that happens before Ian and David go off to build support. Bethesda trying to just appoint David to the council, Ian showing up and demanding a spot as well, along with him now being a member of two clans… Poor Julius, having to wrangle all of them!

And Conrad wishes Julius a good fight, the evening of the first vote. For Conrad, that's awfully friendly. I'd been thinking of his big action later as a spur of the moment thing, but I kind of wonder now if he'd been warming up to Julius since the confrontation at the end of the last book.

Fredrick does the best he can with the resources which are available to him. Which boil down to clothes and overlooked siblings, but still. He also manages Julius really well (benevolently, if snobbily); he knows quite a bit about politics... which might be good, going forward. He’s definitely my favorite of the characters introduced in this book.

I have to wonder why Bethesda picked him for the job, though. First male F in sight, or something more complicated? She might have realized that he's the most rebellious of the lot, and wanted him to have a front-row seat to Julius's presumed failure. That sounds like her, at least.

I'm a bit distracted by the accent the audiobook's narrator uses for Gregory. I get that there are a lot of new characters in this book and most of them are guys, so anything to make them stand out, but it's kind of odd since he's from the same family as the rest of them and literally everyone else has the same accent.

Amelia tells Chelsie that she's being responsible and this is the only future they've got left. Meaning putting her fire in Marci. Meaning Marci lasting that much longer before her death, Amelia being with her in the afterlife, or the birth of the new seer?

Justin telling Julius that he thinks he's got a right to his position is actually awfully sweet, especially combined with telling Julius that unlike their mother, Julius has always been there for him when it mattered.

Conrad can tell Justin he's not up to the job and get away with it! Justin resents that from Chelsie, but when it's his idol talking he's only mildly resentful. I do like Conrad, though; he's the one traditional dragon who comes across as alien rather than an asshole, although that might just be limited exposure. He's got his mores, which have very little in common with human ones, and he'll respect anyone who sticks to their gun—including Julius for his dedication to pacifism, because that shows strength of will, and it’s not as if he actually expects a twenty-four-year-old dragon to be a badass anyway. (I also love the scene he's got where he tells Gregory that the rest of the clan is only alive because he and Chelsie are merciful.)

General Jackson describes her relationship with Raven in the same terms as Ghost always describes his with Marci—mutual assistance. That's a very interesting parallel. I still like her, even considering her actions at the climax. And I want to see more of her. (And her having to work with either Julius or Marci, after the events of this book, would be wonderfully fraught.)

She also says she'll make Marci a Merlin or die trying. So far, it looks like she made Marci a Merlin by killing her (or at least, that's what gave Marci the chance to become one).

Okay, okay, the narrator overdoes it a lot in some of the key scenes (especially Julius’s conversations with Fredrick and Chelsie after David's little murder attempt—wow, overacting! Great scenes, but the narrator is really not helping them any.) But others are spot-on—I really loved Conrad's speech about mercy, when he rescues Julius from Gregory and then announces that Gregory is a disgrace to the clan. (Conrad’s line “It is the privilege of the strong to be merciful” is almost a direct quote of something the Empress Mother says in the prologue. I don’t think there’s any direct link between those two characters; maybe it’s traditional draconic wisdom? Which would kind of fit: Conrad is the only Heartstriker who seems to respect that kind of thing at all. He ends up representing the not-entirely-horrible side of the old ways, which is kind of an interesting twist.)

I also love Chelsie holding Julius back from killing General Jackson, and the way it echoes back to both Julius holding her back from killing David, and Marci sparing Gregory.

On the one hand, Julius is kind of the only member of the family who’s genuinely committed to his reforms at this point; his supporters are tentatively onboard because he’s impressed them, or because they think he might serve their interests. But his line to Fredrick, that someone has to forgive a killing offense for the killing to stop, is absolutely correct: he does have to give up justice (against Bethesda, against David, etc) if he’s going to do what he’s promised. And he cares enough about his family to sacrifice to drag them into this future, even though he has positive relationships with very few of them.

I like how quickly Ian agrees to vote with Julius re: freeing Chelsie and the Fs. He's a practical dragon! And of course, that vote gives him points with twenty or so old and now-powerful dragons, at the cost of further annoying he mother who already hates him.

And the ending. I have a hard time talking about this, because I have actually already read the next book, and it's a cliffhanger that reads very differently in the light of what comes afterwards. But Bob killing Amelia, even with her telling him to do it, is genuinely shocking and genuinely sad. (And Svena is going to be even more angry when she figures out that the same guy who killed her beloved rival also thwarted her efforts to hatch the next seer.) And I sincerely love the final image, Bob walking out of the mountain with the baby dragon hidden in his coat.


Random aside: I'd thought the names were off in this, especially the older characters. I still don't know how plausible the elder Heartstrikers' names are (especially Chelsie, which reads awfully modern to me), but Algonquin's actually makes some sense in context. Apparently, she takes her name from the ancient predecessor to the Great Lakes, which probably existed the last time she was awake given the timescale of the magic drought. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Algonquin

Other random nitpick: The timeline kind of falls apart in this book. Bob is born 9000 years after the dragons arrive, fine, I can accept that; Amelia is about a hundred years younger than Bethesda, she's born before the drought and Bob during. That also works. But I'm kind of perplexed everything else in the prologue. Chelsie is the youngest daughter of Bethesda the Heartstriker, she's twenty years old, and D and E clutches have already been laid. Yet later on Julius says that most of his mother's clutches were over a hundred years apart, even though she had one a decade for a while? (And did she not have any daughters in D and E clutches? If so, is that on purpose or just a weird coincidence? And if it's on purpose, why? There are a few points where it's implied that Bethesda sees her daughters as a greater threat than her sons, but no real explanation as to why.) And the numbers of the clan don't really add up either—there are about four hundred Heartstrikers, and yet they're supposed to be from ten clutches of about twenty eggs each, with a good deal of attrition in the upper alphabet. Although the clutch size estimate is from Mother of the Year and it's Bethesda who says that twenty-four was the most she's had; I suppose she could've been lying to give a false impression of the clan's size.