Eighteen-year-old Catherine Rayborn is thrilled with her first taste of independence when she begins Girton College in Cambridge in 1880. Amid all the excitement, however, comes the painful realization of the vast difference between true love and shallow infatuation. Lawana Blackwell skillfully endears a cast of loveable characters to readers in a story that will linger long after the last page is turned.

"Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general--also known as her tough-as-talons mother--has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you're smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away ... because dragons don't bond to 'fragile' humans....