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zoepagereader's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
This book is like if Harry Potter was more quidditch centered without all of the controversy and also had dragons. It really was one of those books that was so diverse it slaps you in the face in the best possible way. Also dragons are excellent. It always takes skill to invent a new sport, especially one that has magic.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Hate crime
its_madi's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
2.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Minor: Homophobia
foreverinastory's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
So many dragons. I love to see it.
Y'all I'm still so amazed by this book. I loved everything about this from the cast to the plot. The ending was super satisfying too. I'm really curious to see what will happen in the sequel since events were wrapped up very nicely in this one.
Lana Torres has always loved Blazewrath. Ever since she can remember it's been part of her relationship with her father. When her home, Puerto Rico, finds its own dragons and enters the tournament, Lana has only dreamed of becoming the runner for Team Puerto Rico. Even though Lana hasn't been back to the island in 12 years, the island is in her blood.
The game of Blazewrath is exhilarating and dangerous. I loved learning more about it and seeing all the various training islands everyone goes through. When Lana becomes the new runner for Team PR she must train harder than she ever has in order to match up with the other teams. But something else is also stirring. The Sire, a dragon cursed into human form, is causing havoc and burning down dragon sanctuaries unless the Blazewrath World Cup is cancelled.
There is so much happening in this book. Like truly I am amazed every time I think of this ultimate masterpiece. I loved the cast of characters, everyone was dynamic and felt like a full character. I loved how easily diverse this book was too. And there were so many queer characters for a book that doesn't have a main romance pairing either!
Really I can't recommend this enough!
Rep: Biracial white and Puerto Rican female MC, Black female side character, white British achillean male side character in a MLM relationship, trans female side character, Puerto Rican male side character who uses a wheelchair, several Puerto Rican side characters, Japanese male side character, Scottish male side character, Muslim female side character, various other teams from China, Zimbabwe, Russia, Scotland, Japan and more.
CWs: Blood, bullying (specifically saying someone doesn't belong/isn't Puerto Rican enough because they haven't lived on the island recently), death, fire/fire injury, grief, injury/injury detail, murder, racism/colorism, violence. Moderate: alcoholism of side character, past mentions of child & domestic abuse, past mentions of parent's death, child death, homophobia/homomisia, kidnapping, torture. Brief: past mention/depiction of pregnancy.
Y'all I'm still so amazed by this book. I loved everything about this from the cast to the plot. The ending was super satisfying too. I'm really curious to see what will happen in the sequel since events were wrapped up very nicely in this one.
Lana Torres has always loved Blazewrath. Ever since she can remember it's been part of her relationship with her father. When her home, Puerto Rico, finds its own dragons and enters the tournament, Lana has only dreamed of becoming the runner for Team Puerto Rico. Even though Lana hasn't been back to the island in 12 years, the island is in her blood.
The game of Blazewrath is exhilarating and dangerous. I loved learning more about it and seeing all the various training islands everyone goes through. When Lana becomes the new runner for Team PR she must train harder than she ever has in order to match up with the other teams. But something else is also stirring. The Sire, a dragon cursed into human form, is causing havoc and burning down dragon sanctuaries unless the Blazewrath World Cup is cancelled.
There is so much happening in this book. Like truly I am amazed every time I think of this ultimate masterpiece. I loved the cast of characters, everyone was dynamic and felt like a full character. I loved how easily diverse this book was too. And there were so many queer characters for a book that doesn't have a main romance pairing either!
Really I can't recommend this enough!
Rep: Biracial white and Puerto Rican female MC, Black female side character, white British achillean male side character in a MLM relationship, trans female side character, Puerto Rican male side character who uses a wheelchair, several Puerto Rican side characters, Japanese male side character, Scottish male side character, Muslim female side character, various other teams from China, Zimbabwe, Russia, Scotland, Japan and more.
CWs: Blood, bullying (specifically saying someone doesn't belong/isn't Puerto Rican enough because they haven't lived on the island recently), death, fire/fire injury, grief, injury/injury detail, murder, racism/colorism, violence. Moderate: alcoholism of side character, past mentions of child & domestic abuse, past mentions of parent's death, child death, homophobia/homomisia, kidnapping, torture. Brief: past mention/depiction of pregnancy.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Bullying, Death, Racism, Violence, Blood, Grief, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Alcoholism, Child abuse, Child death, Domestic abuse, Homophobia, Torture, Kidnapping, and Death of parent
Minor: Pregnancy
rorikae's review against another edition
adventurous
inspiring
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
‘Blazewrath Games’ by Amparo Ortiz follows Lana Torres, a girl who has long dreamed of playing in the Blazewrath World Cup for Puerto Rico’s team. Lana lives in a fantastically slanted version of our world where dragons exist and humans ride them to compete in the Blazewrath World Cup. When Lana gets the chance to join Puerto Rico’s team, she is also thrown into a conspiracy that includes the Sire, a dragon that now lives cursed in a human body, who wants nothing more than to see the cup cancelled.
‘Blazewrath Games’ is an incredibly fun and intriguing story that pairs exciting worldbuilding with complex and engaging characters. Ortiz does a great job of including bits and pieces at the beginning of each chapter so that the reader is introduced slowly to the world and it builds off of what is happening in the story itself. Since Lana is new to participating in the Blazewrath Games, she is a great point of view character because, though she is well versed in the world, she is still learning new things right along with the reader.
One of my favorite parts of this story is the mystery that is simmering along in the background. Ortiz drops bits of information that expand what the character’s know and continues to increase the tension in the story. My other favorite aspect is the found family, both with Lana and her friend Samira, as well as the family dynamic that is built between the Puerto Rican team players.
The ending of this story does a great job of wrapping up what has been happening while leaving open enough pieces for the sequel. I am very intrigued to see where this story goes next and I will definitely be following along with what Ortiz writes in the future.
‘Blazewrath Games’ is an incredibly fun and intriguing story that pairs exciting worldbuilding with complex and engaging characters. Ortiz does a great job of including bits and pieces at the beginning of each chapter so that the reader is introduced slowly to the world and it builds off of what is happening in the story itself. Since Lana is new to participating in the Blazewrath Games, she is a great point of view character because, though she is well versed in the world, she is still learning new things right along with the reader.
One of my favorite parts of this story is the mystery that is simmering along in the background. Ortiz drops bits of information that expand what the character’s know and continues to increase the tension in the story. My other favorite aspect is the found family, both with Lana and her friend Samira, as well as the family dynamic that is built between the Puerto Rican team players.
The ending of this story does a great job of wrapping up what has been happening while leaving open enough pieces for the sequel. I am very intrigued to see where this story goes next and I will definitely be following along with what Ortiz writes in the future.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Confinement, Death, Homophobia, Violence, Blood, Kidnapping, Grief, and Murder
marissasbooks's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Violence, Blood, and Murder
thewildmageslibrary's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
3.5
Read: March 2021
I enjoyed this, but not as much as I thought I would. Things I loved: the conversation around belonging and community, the queer rep, DRAGONS, Samira, and the villain. Things that didn't quite work for me: too many plot-threads and developments for the sake of convenience. Lana also changed her mind about so many things so many times, it kept jarring me out of the story. Overall, I did like the book, and will definitely read the sequel!
CW: character death, violence, death threats, murder, mention of homophobia
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Violence, and Murder
Minor: Homophobia
olivialandryxo's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Ortiz’s debut is brilliantly written, with complex characters, epic dragons, and high stakes. I loved Lana and Team Puerto Rico, and their friendships with each other and other players. I loved the idea of Blazewrath, and the matches were so much fun to read. While I would’ve liked to see Lana in a romantic relationship with someone, I respect that she wasn’t. My only issue with this book was that, though the story captured my attention, it didn’t consistently hold my attention until the last third of the book. Nonetheless, I’ll definitely be reading the sequel. I want more of Team Puerto Rico and their dragons. Highly recommended.
Representation
Representation
- biracial Puerto Rican-American protagonist
- Black side character
- Afro-Latinx side character
- Puerto Rican bisexual side character
- gay Puerto Rican side character
- Japanese side character
- multiple queer side characters
- side character in a wheelchair
- other side characters of color
CW: death, child death, murder, violence, ableism, racism, sexism, child abuse, cancer
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death, Violence, and Murder
Minor: Ableism, Cancer, Child abuse, Racism, and Sexism
booksthatburn's review against another edition
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
Blazewrath Games is the story of a teenager trying to fulfill her lifelong dream of playing a particular magical sport, now disillusioned when it turns out to have much more sinister origins but she has to play anyway.
I really like the sport centered in this book. It makes sense as something you could really play in human/dragon teams, and it’s suitable epic-feeling to make a major tournament of in a world with magic. I wish we’d gotten more of it, because, unfortunately, this book really didn’t click with me, I could never quite get into the style, but it has a lot of strengths and I want to highlight those for anyone who doesn’t have tastes identical to mine (so... most people).
It has an explanatory style which makes sure to clarify a lot of stuff that could be confusing when left as subtext. Often something will happen, the MC reacts, then they think about what just happened in a way that makes its importance explicit. The backstory of the world is really complicated and so it does help to clarify what's going on, but for me it repeatedly broke my immersion because it reinforced the fact that I'm not in that world and I don't know the backstory. I prefer stories which move on and assume I'll keep up. This explanatory style is clearly a deliberate choice from the author, and it's used consistently throughout the book, so if that's what you like then this is a pretty good version of it.
A lot of the action scenes feel like they’re written for people who don’t care about action scenes (or who don't need any help to picture them on their own). They’re written to convey vaguely what happened, and they do a great job of capturing the emotion behind them, but they only occasionally describe individual moves within the fights. I don't picture things in my head very well, so if I don't get a full description it feels like the scene didn't happen, but people who either don't need to "see" it or who can with just a little prompting will probably do fine. The big action scenes at the very end had more description than the earlier ones, but even there it skipped over a lot of details I would have liked.
I liked the second half a lot better than the first, at least in terms of style, because enough things had been explained by that point for the narration to relax and for the MC to no longer constantly stop to explain every thing to us. For anyone who likes that explanatory style, it’s still there, just every 5-10 pages instead of 1-2. The infodumps never quit though, even at the end there were places where the MC stopped to explain a major story element or over-explain the implications of what someone else just said.
Now for the aspects I didn’t like at all. I constantly felt jerked around as a reader. Because of the way backstory is handled, I’d be told something was important at the same time I learned it even was a factor in something. Occasionally there were “revelations” or epiphanies which were discarded as unimportant by the MC when she’d barely finished hyping how awesome they were. I felt like I was being dragged by someone solving a maze at top speed by running into all the walls until they got out. I never had a chance to figure out something myself, or to experience a slow revelation from clues earlier in the story. I just watched the MC race through the possibilities until the book ended. I don’t need to be led along, I enjoy some mystery, and I don’t normally mind being confused, but it felt like the story couldn’t decide between being clear and being mysterious, and the result was, for me at least, the worst of both worlds. It also manages to be a book about dragons which spends most of the book not having dragons in the major scenes. Even the training montage is largely centered on hand-to-hand fighting and intra-team drama instead of the dragons. That’s not all bad, but it meant that in addition to not feeling great about the story I also didn’t get much of what was, for me, the main draw to the story in the first place. I would feel misled if someone pitched this book to me as any version of “a worldwide competition of a sport with dragons”, because that’s only technically true. The focus is much more on the machinations behind the scenes which are affecting the games.
The ending was fine, it works, there was yet another revelation at the end in a way that explained some confusing things from earlier, but not enough to change my general opinion. If you're interested from what I've said then go for it, you might like it.
I really like the sport centered in this book. It makes sense as something you could really play in human/dragon teams, and it’s suitable epic-feeling to make a major tournament of in a world with magic. I wish we’d gotten more of it, because, unfortunately, this book really didn’t click with me, I could never quite get into the style, but it has a lot of strengths and I want to highlight those for anyone who doesn’t have tastes identical to mine (so... most people).
It has an explanatory style which makes sure to clarify a lot of stuff that could be confusing when left as subtext. Often something will happen, the MC reacts, then they think about what just happened in a way that makes its importance explicit. The backstory of the world is really complicated and so it does help to clarify what's going on, but for me it repeatedly broke my immersion because it reinforced the fact that I'm not in that world and I don't know the backstory. I prefer stories which move on and assume I'll keep up. This explanatory style is clearly a deliberate choice from the author, and it's used consistently throughout the book, so if that's what you like then this is a pretty good version of it.
A lot of the action scenes feel like they’re written for people who don’t care about action scenes (or who don't need any help to picture them on their own). They’re written to convey vaguely what happened, and they do a great job of capturing the emotion behind them, but they only occasionally describe individual moves within the fights. I don't picture things in my head very well, so if I don't get a full description it feels like the scene didn't happen, but people who either don't need to "see" it or who can with just a little prompting will probably do fine. The big action scenes at the very end had more description than the earlier ones, but even there it skipped over a lot of details I would have liked.
I liked the second half a lot better than the first, at least in terms of style, because enough things had been explained by that point for the narration to relax and for the MC to no longer constantly stop to explain every thing to us. For anyone who likes that explanatory style, it’s still there, just every 5-10 pages instead of 1-2. The infodumps never quit though, even at the end there were places where the MC stopped to explain a major story element or over-explain the implications of what someone else just said.
Now for the aspects I didn’t like at all. I constantly felt jerked around as a reader. Because of the way backstory is handled, I’d be told something was important at the same time I learned it even was a factor in something. Occasionally there were “revelations” or epiphanies which were discarded as unimportant by the MC when she’d barely finished hyping how awesome they were. I felt like I was being dragged by someone solving a maze at top speed by running into all the walls until they got out. I never had a chance to figure out something myself, or to experience a slow revelation from clues earlier in the story. I just watched the MC race through the possibilities until the book ended. I don’t need to be led along, I enjoy some mystery, and I don’t normally mind being confused, but it felt like the story couldn’t decide between being clear and being mysterious, and the result was, for me at least, the worst of both worlds. It also manages to be a book about dragons which spends most of the book not having dragons in the major scenes. Even the training montage is largely centered on hand-to-hand fighting and intra-team drama instead of the dragons. That’s not all bad, but it meant that in addition to not feeling great about the story I also didn’t get much of what was, for me, the main draw to the story in the first place. I would feel misled if someone pitched this book to me as any version of “a worldwide competition of a sport with dragons”, because that’s only technically true. The focus is much more on the machinations behind the scenes which are affecting the games.
The ending was fine, it works, there was yet another revelation at the end in a way that explained some confusing things from earlier, but not enough to change my general opinion. If you're interested from what I've said then go for it, you might like it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death and Death
Minor: Ableism, Child abuse, Racism, and Sexism
CW for child abuse (backstory), racism (microaggressions), ableism (minor, unexamined), sexism, kidnapping, child death, major character death, death.