Dragon Cursed

I picked up Dragon Cursed because romantasy shelves have felt copy pasted for two years and Elise Kova usually gives me at least one idea I have not seen before. She published it with Entangled: Mayhem Books in January 2026, a 448 page hardcover with ISBN 9781649377838, and it launches both a new world and a new imprint aimed at upper young adult readers. The premise hooked me fast. Dragons came back along with a plague called the scourge, humanity's cities fell one by one, and a single city holds out while its rulers hunt anyone who might be turning into the enemy. Our heroine might be one of them. I read the first hundred pages in one night and dreamed about teeth.

The book opens with a line that does a lot of work: the moment you see a dragon is usually your last. That sentence sets the scale. These are not pets or boyfriends with wings. They are extinction events with teeth, and the scourge that arrived with them hollowed out whole regions before anyone understood what was happening. Kova parcels out the history slowly, through lessons, rumors, and official announcements that contradict each other. I liked that choice. You learn this world the way its citizens do, through stories that may be edited by people with reasons to edit. By page fifty I had a working map in my head and a suspicion that the official story had holes. Both turned out to be load bearing.

What surprised me is how quickly the book turns from survival horror into something more paranoid. The dragons are the threat from above. The threat from within is worse, because anyone could be tainted, anyone could be lying, and the authorities catch and kill suspects without much ceremony. That three part fear repeats like a drumbeat and it works. Every friendship in the book carries it. Every kindness could be cover. I have read plenty of fantasies with secret magic, but few make secrecy feel this much like holding your breath.

The last city of Vingard

Vingard is the only human city still standing, and Kova builds it as a fortress with an infection. Walls keep dragons out. Inspections, trials, and informers are supposed to keep the curse out, and they half work, which is worse than failing cleanly. The result is a place that feels safe until you notice the checkpoints, then feels watched, then feels like a trap with good bakeries. I mean that as praise. Cities in fantasy often get a paragraph of walls and a market scene. Vingard gets systems: how food arrives, who stands guard, what happens to families of the accused, which streets go quiet after curfews that are never officially called curfews. The map and endpaper art by Elizabeth Turner Stokes help, and the deluxe edition with sprayed edges is genuinely pretty, but the writing does the heavy lifting.

The scourge itself stays partly mysterious for most of the book, and that restraint is smart. We know it ravaged lands and people alongside the dragons' return. We know survival left marks on bodies and records. What we do not get, at least not yet, is a lecture on its biology. Kova treats the unknown as a feature of life in Vingard rather than a gap in her notes. Scholars in the city argue about causes. Priests and officers give simpler answers that serve them. Ordinary people swap theories that reflect their fears. I believed in the plague because the characters disagreed about it the way real people disagree about disasters, everyone certain, nobody complete. If book two explains everything neatly, some of this fog will burn off, and I will miss it a little.

One structural gripe already: the city is vivid but the world beyond the walls is mostly rumor, which means long stretches where the setting is corridors, classrooms, and testing halls. Claustrophobia suits the themes, and Kova uses it deliberately, but readers who came for dragons in open skies should know the skies stay mostly empty and terrifying. The dragons are sharks. You see fins, you hear about attacks, you rarely get the full breach until it counts. When it counts, it counts enormously.

Isola, the reborn savior

Isola is eighteen and famous for the worst reason. As a small child she survived a dragon attack, a thing that essentially never happens, and she came out of it with rare legendary magic. The city calls her the reborn savior of humanity. Statues would be easier than what she actually gets, which is worship from strangers and suspicion from everyone with power. Kova gives her a sharp, tired voice, funny in private and careful in public, and the gap between those two modes is where the character lives. She performs gratitude while scanning every room for exits. I liked her within chapters and ached for her by the middle.

Her private fear is the book's motor. She suspects her power is not a gift at all but the early stage of being Dragon Cursed, the slow and excruciating transformation into a mindless beast that destroys everything and everyone she loves. Kova never lets you settle on an answer. Isola's magic does things that look miraculous in one light and symptomatic in another. A healing looks like grace until someone asks what it cost. A burst of strength saves a life and then follows her home as a question. Watching her test herself in secret, pushing at the edges of her own body to see what pushes back, made for the tensest scenes in the book. It also makes her relatable in a way chosen ones rarely are. Most saviors doubt their worthiness. Isola doubts her species. That is a harder problem and a better one.

The supporting cast orbits this fear. Friends who love the legend and do not know the girl. Mentors who praise her in public and measure her in private. Rivals who smell fraud or threat and cannot tell which. Kova is good at writing admiration that curdles, the moment someone's awe turns into inventory taking. There are warm relationships too, late night honesty, shared food, jokes that only work under pressure, and those land harder because the paranoia prices them correctly. Trust in Vingard costs more than coin. People pay it anyway, sometimes foolishly, and the book never mocks them for it.

Lucan and the trials

Then there is Lucan, the shadow at Isola's shoulder. He follows her everywhere, part protector, part tormentor, fully annoying by her own account, and obviously carrying secrets by the million. The slow burn romance readers were promised lives mostly here, in proximity that neither of them chose and both of them start arranging their days around. He watches. She watches him watching. Information trades hands in small units, a warning here, a withheld file there, a hand on her arm at exactly the wrong moment. I have read this dynamic many times and Kova executes it above average because Lucan's secrecy reads as duty rather than game playing. He knows something, definitely, and the book is fair about dropping hints without tipping which of several ugly possibilities is true.

The trials give all of this a frame. Every teen in the last stronghold faces brutal tests designed to separate dragon hunters from the dragon cursed, and Isola must survive examinations built to expose exactly what she is hiding. Kova writes test sequences well. The tasks vary, physical trials, riddles of control, interviews that are interrogations with better furniture, and each one forces Isola to use the power she fears while pretending it behaves. The cheating is the fun part. Watching a powerful character sandbag, solving just enough to pass while hiding the rest, inverts the usual training montage. Instead of growing stronger in public, she practices looking ordinary, and ordinary takes enormous effort. One trial involving containment rules had my shoulders up around my ears. I will not spoil it beyond saying the cleverness of her solution tells you everything about how her mind works under threat.

My complaint is pace. The middle third runs long on preparation and short on payoff. Trial after lesson after tense meal after lesson. The slow burn label is honest, and patient readers will be fed, but around page 280 I wanted either a dragon or a definitive answer, and Kova offered another qualifier round. It works on reread, when you catch the planted details, but on first pass the sag is real. Trim thirty pages of corridors and this book sings straight through.

Power and who controls the story

The ideas underneath the romance are stronger than romantasy usually bothers with. In an interview about the launch, Kova said she wants readers thinking about the nature of power, who has it, who wants to control it, and what claiming it for yourself means. That theme runs through every institution in Vingard. The authorities control information about the scourge, about the dragons, about what the curse looks like and who has been taken. Isola's legend is itself a controlled story, useful to leaders whether or not it is true. She starts asking who benefits from each version of events, and the book rewards that question without ever handing her a clean rebellion script. There is no wise resistance with pamphlets waiting in chapter nine. There are frightened people making partial choices, which felt truer.

This is also where the upper young adult label earns its keep. Mayhem, the Entangled imprint launching with this book, aims at readers between younger teen fare and full adult fantasy, and Dragon Cursed sits in that gap deliberately. The violence has consequences and the politics have teeth, but the focus stays on identity, first love, and who gets to define you. Adult readers of Kova's Arcana Academy will find this leaner and less baroque. Younger readers stepping up from school based fantasy will find the stakes raised without cruelty for its own sake. Content notes for parents and sensitive readers: monster violence and body horror around transformation, state executions discussed and partly shown, grief, panic, injuries, and chaste to moderately heated romantic tension rather than explicit scenes. Nothing here felt gratuitous. Most of it felt necessary.

The planned duology structure shapes everything. This is book one of two, and it reads like it. Threads stay open, a major revelation lands late and reframes earlier chapters, and the final act is climax plus doorway rather than climax plus rest. Readers burned by unfinished series should know Kova has a strong completion record across Air Awakens, the Married to Magic books, and others, and the second volume is already announced. I still felt the incompleteness at the end, that specific hunger of a story paused mid breath. It is a feature of the form, but name it so it does not surprise you.

Gripes, fairly stated

No book with this much scaffolding escapes familiar shapes, and Dragon Cursed leans on a few. The special girl with secret powers, the brooding watcher with a file on her, the trials that sort the worthy, you have met these before. Kova's defense is execution and theme: she knows the shapes and fills them with specific fears about illness, surveillance, and propaganda. That defense mostly holds. Mostly. Two reveals I predicted a hundred pages early, and one betrayal arrives on such standard schedule that its emotional force exceeds its surprise. The prose occasionally slips into the genre's default diction too, characters going still, eyes darkening, silence doing heavy lifting. None of it is bad. Some of it is furniture you have sat on before.

The trials structure also creates a fairness problem. Kova needs Isola powerful enough to thrill us and restrained enough to stay hidden, and a few escapes thread the needle so finely that luck deserves co author credit. One late sequence in particular stacks coincidences, a mistimed patrol, an overheard phrase, a tool left where tools should not be. Each is plausible alone. Together they smell of plot. I forgave it because the emotional logic held, Isola earns her exits through preparation far more than fortune, but a stricter edit would have removed one coincidence too many. Similarly, the wider cast beyond Isola and Lucan can blur. I mixed up two instructors for most of the book and only sorted them by their opinions of Isola, which tells you the opinions were characterized better than the men.

None of this sank the book for me. It kept it from the top shelf, which is a different thing. Dragon Cursed is a very good first volume with elite atmosphere and a heroine worth following, carrying fixable flaws in pacing and familiarity. The flaws are the kind a second book can erase from memory. If the finale sticks its revelations, nobody will remember the saggy qualifier rounds. If it fumbles, they will. That is the honest gamble of loving book one of two.

Who should read it

Read it if you like dragons as horror, trials with real stakes, slow burn banter under surveillance, and heroines managing impossible secrets. It suits upper teen readers and adult romantasy fans who want the romance present but not dominant, and it will especially please Kova readers who followed her from Air Awakens through Married to Magic into her darker epic work. Start here rather than waiting for the duology to complete, since the mystery machinery rewards theorizing between volumes.

Facts to cite are firm. First published in January 2026 by Entangled: Mayhem Books, 448 pages, ISBN 9781649377838. Author Elise Kova, bestselling author of Air Awakens and Arcana Academy. Book one of a planned duology. Heroine Isola, eighteen, survivor of a childhood dragon attack hailed as a reborn savior, fears her magic marks her as Dragon Cursed. Last human city Vingard. Dragons returned with the scourge. Lucan shadows and guards her. Cover, map, and endpapers by Elizabeth Turner Stokes. Tags that fit are fantasy, dragons, romantasy, trials, young adult.

I finished it past midnight and sat quiet for a while, thinking about Isola checking her own skin for signs and about how the scariest monster in Vingard is not the thing with wings but the knock after curfew. Then I did what the book wants: I started suspecting everyone, reread two early scenes, and found one line that means something different now. That reread test is my favorite measure of a first volume. Dragon Cursed passes it. Bring patience for the middle, attention for the margins, and someone to argue with about Lucan. You will need all three before book two.