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Verdict: A warm, genuinely unusual cosy fantasy — dragons who imprint inside the egg, a realm run as a co-operative a century after its monarchy fell — ending on a cliffhanger that has now gone five years without a sequel.
Best for: Readers who want low-angst hopepunk with Scottish texture and a dragon hatchling, and who can live with an unfinished story and visible copy-editing.
Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — the evidence conflicts; see below. romance.io has no entry for this book)
Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.3/5 — a 3.71 Goodreads average, pulled down by an editing collapse readers place at the twenty-percent mark)
Tropes: Dragon hatchling bond, cosy fantasy, scholar heroine, deposed royalty, imprinting, political conspiracy, low-angst romance, found family, hopepunk, series opener.
The Flames of Albiyon by Jean Menzies is a self-published sapphic fantasy from September 2021, set on an island realm a century after its monarchy was overthrown, where the university and the library sit at the centre of a co-operatively governed society — and where the scholar Adairia accidentally cracks a dormant dragon egg and has to learn what to do about it from Isla, the last direct descendant of the deposed royal line.
It carries a 3.71 average across 429 Goodreads ratings and a 3.74 across 298 StoryGraph reviews. Two numbers from that StoryGraph data tell you what kind of book it is faster than any blurb: 65% of its readers rate the mood hopeful, and 79% say character flaws are not a focus. That is the numerical signature of a genuinely low-conflict book, and whether that is what you want will decide everything.
What Is The Flames of Albiyon About?
Cosy fantasy usually means small stakes in a warm place. This one is cosy in a more interesting way: the setting is a functioning post-revolutionary society, and the book is quietly, cheerfully interested in how it works. Readers have described Albiyon as a medieval parliamentary social democracy and as a co-operative commonwealth, and at least one names socialism outright as part of the appeal. The monarchy was overthrown a century ago and what replaced it is not a power vacuum but an administration, with a university and a library at its centre.
Adairia is a scholar raised inside that university, which means she has read about dragons and never expected to meet one. Isla is the last direct descendant of the family the revolution removed, and she is the companion of Tearlach, a dragon a century old. The worldbuilding hook that makes the book worth its shelf space is that Albiyan dragons imprint on a human while still in the egg — so the bond is not chosen, earned or fought for, it simply already happened before anyone knew. Adairia cracks a dormant egg by accident, and Fia hatches with her already decided on.
What Makes This Cosy Sapphic Dragon Fantasy Work
- The tone: five or more readers name the low-angst warmth, reaching for words like “a warm hug” and “hopepunk”. StoryGraph’s numbers back them exactly — hopeful at 65%, flaws not a focus at 79%.
- The politics: three readers specifically praise the post-monarchy co-operative setting, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a fantasy to build and a rarer one to make pleasant company.
- Fia: two readers rank the bond between Adairia and the hatchling above the romance, one saying the dragon captured most of her attention the whole way through.
- The Scottish dialect: four readers praise it, including one Scottish reader who says she did not cringe her way through the dialogue — which is the highest available compliment on that particular axis.
- The imprinting mechanic: a bond that predates the meeting is a fresh answer to a question most dragon books solve with destiny.
Book Synopsis
Adairia has spent her life in the Albiyan university, which is the safest place in a realm that has spent a century learning to run itself without a crown. Her work is with old things — records, artefacts, the material a library accumulates when nobody has thrown anything away for a hundred years. One of those old things turns out to be an egg, and the egg turns out not to be dormant.
Fia hatches already attached. That is how it works in Albiyon: a dragon chooses inside the shell, and by the time anyone can ask about it the decision is a century-old fact. Adairia has no idea what to do with a hatchling, and there is exactly one person in the realm who does — Isla, whose family used to own the place, and whose own dragon, Tearlach, is old enough to remember when they did.
What starts as instruction becomes something slower and quieter, at exactly the pace two careful people manage. Around them, something is moving against the republic that replaced the monarchy — and the woman teaching Adairia about dragons is also the woman a conspiracy would most like to put back on a throne she has never asked for.
My Review
There is a real book in here and it is a nice one. The republic of Albiyon is the most thought-about setting in this batch of reviews — a fantasy realm that overthrew its monarchy and then had to run itself, rendered without either triumphalism or cynicism, and readers respond to it. The imprinting mechanic is a genuinely good idea: a bond that was decided before the two parties met removes all the destiny-shopping that dragon fantasy usually spends its first act on. And the Scottish register is handled with enough care that a Scottish reader specifically noted not wincing, which anyone who has read English-authored Scots dialogue will recognise as high praise.
Fia is the best character in it. Two readers say straightforwardly that the hatchling held their attention more than the romance did, and having read it I understand why — the relationship between a scholar and a small creature that has already decided about her is the warmest thing on the page.
The dominant complaint is copy-editing, and what makes it unusually credible is that four or more independent readers describe the same shape rather than the same annoyance. The book, they say, is serviceable for roughly its first fifth and then degrades — typos, missing quotation marks, incorrect punctuation and capitalisation, and sudden shifts in point of view. One reviewer gives that twenty-percent figure precisely. The one blog critic who covered the book puts it more gently, saying it carries a handful more errors than a professionally published book would, but the readers describe something closer to a collapse. There is a genuine wrinkle worth noting: one Scottish reader argues that some of what other reviewers report as spelling mistakes is in fact Scots being read as error. Both things can be true, and the volume of complaints suggests both are.
Underneath that sit two more. Two or three readers say nothing much happens until the final forty pages, one adding that there is no subtlety to the prose and no chemistry in the interactions. And three name flat secondary characters, which StoryGraph corroborates — only half its crowd rates the character development strong and a third say it is not, the weakest score in this batch.
The expectation that most needs resetting is what kind of book you are buying. It is shelved and sold as sapphic romance; it is not one. A romance-first reader puts it plainly: the romance subplot is very low key and not a huge part of the story. Another says approvingly that it did not take over the book. Come for the dragons and the republic, and treat Adairia and Isla as a thread rather than a spine.
And then there is the ending. It is a cliffhanger. Amazon labels the book “Book 1 of 1”, which is technically accurate and practically misleading, because the conspiracy plot does not close and there is no book two — five years on, with no title and no date. Several readers describe the frustration of discovering mid-read that this was a series, and one wrote in mid-2025 simply that it was published in 2021 and there had still been no follow-up. That is the single most important thing to know before starting.
My honest note: A lovely, gentle, genuinely inventive book that stops rather than ends and needed one more editorial pass. Read it if an unresolved story does not spoil things for you — and if it does, read the author’s traditionally published The Lady of the Lake instead.
| Element | In The Flames of Albiyon |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Adairia & Isla — a university scholar and the last direct descendant of the deposed royal line |
| Core tropes | Dragon hatchling bond, imprinting, cosy fantasy, scholar heroine, deposed royalty, political conspiracy |
| Setting | Albiyon, a Scottish-inflected island realm run co-operatively a century after its monarchy was overthrown |
| Heat level | 2/5 — the evidence conflicts; readers report low-key while StoryGraph’s crowd flags sexual content as graphic |
| Series | The Flames of Albiyon book 1 — ends on a cliffhanger, and no sequel has appeared in five years |
| Content notes | Fire injury, sexual content and medical content as graphic; death, terminal illness and injury as moderate; grief, murder and alcohol as minor |
How Spicy Is The Flames of Albiyon?
This is the one section on this page where the evidence genuinely conflicts, and rather than pick a side quietly we will show you both. romance.io has no entry for this book at all, so there is no crowd-sourced steam band. StoryGraph’s content-warning crowd lists sexual content as graphic — its highest tier. Readers describe something quite different: one calls the romance low-key steamy, another says the book reads on the young side even of young adult, and a third says the romance barely takes up space. Those two pictures do not reconcile.
Our 2/5 leans towards the readers, because there are more of them and they are describing the reading experience rather than tagging a category — but we are reporting the StoryGraph flag rather than burying it, because it is what that crowd submitted and you may want to know. If you want a heat rating somebody has actually voted on, Treasured sits at a verified 3/5 and Dragon Queens at a verified 5/5.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you want hopepunk with genuinely low conflict, you find political worldbuilding pleasant rather than heavy, you want a dragon hatchling more than a dragon rider, and Scottish texture in a fantasy appeals.
You may want to skip it if: unresolved endings frustrate you, visible copy-editing errors pull you out of a story, you want the romance to be the plot, or you need something to happen before the last forty pages.
In short: a warm, inventive republic with dragons in it, unfinished and under-edited.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)
Five years after publication this book has almost no public footprint. A Reddit search turns up exactly one mention — a passing recommendation inside a three-year-old r/Fantasy thread from someone looking to get back into dragon fantasy — and no dedicated discussion anywhere. There is no TikTok content for it, which is notable given that Menzies runs a BookTube channel and a history podcast and is therefore not a stranger to a camera. There are no trade reviews, which is what you expect for self-publication, and nothing from The Lesbrary, The Lesbian Review, LezReviewBooks, Bookish Sapphic, Lambda Literary or LGBTQ Reads. The entire editorial coverage is two blog reviews. A note on the byline while we are here: the book itself is credited to Jean Menzies, though her own biography says she publishes fantasy as Jean Z. Menzies, and one review and one retailer use that form — same author, two renderings.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The tone, first and by a wide margin. Five or more readers reach for the same register — a warm hug, cosy and feel-good, quiet and hopeful, hopepunk — and StoryGraph’s crowd puts the numbers behind it with hopeful at 65% and flaws-not-a-focus at 79%. Then the setting: three readers specifically name the post-monarchy co-operative society, one calling it socialism and another describing it as a medieval parliamentary social democracy, which is not a sentence you often get to write about a dragon book. Then the hatchling — two readers rank Fia above the romance outright. And four readers praise the Scottish dialect, including a Scottish reader whose approval is the most load-bearing of the four. StoryGraph’s crowd rates the cast 87% loveable and 90% diverse.
What readers argue about and complain about: Copy-editing, above everything, and the complaint has an unusually specific shape — four or more independent readers say the book is serviceable for its first fifth and then deteriorates, listing typos, missing quotation marks, wrong punctuation and capitalisation, and abrupt point-of-view shifts. One gives the twenty-percent figure exactly. The sole blog critic to review the book names the same problem in gentler terms. Second: two or three readers say nothing happens until the last forty pages, with one two-star reviewer adding that there is no depth to the characters and no chemistry in their interactions. Third: three readers find the secondary cast flat, and StoryGraph’s split of 50% to 34% on strong character development is the weakest in this batch. Fourth, and the one that compounds with time: the cliffhanger with no sequel, raised by three or more readers, with the most recent writing in mid-2025 to say the book came out in 2021 and there is still nothing. And there is one genuine dispute worth naming — a single reader found the dialect impenetrable, four praised it, and a Scottish reader argues that some of what others logged as spelling errors is simply Scots. Two readers looking at the same sentence and disagreeing about whether it is a mistake is about as clean a split as reception gets.
The series question everyone should ask first: the book does not resolve. The romance reaches a sweet, low-heat landing but the conspiracy plot is left open, and Amazon’s “Book 1 of 1” label is accurate about what exists rather than about what the story needs. No book two has been announced, titled or dated in five years. If that is a dealbreaker, there is a genuinely good alternative in the same author’s catalogue: The Lady of the Lake, a sapphic Camelot retelling published by Penguin’s Michael Joseph in May 2025, sitting at 3.60 across 704 Goodreads ratings. It is traditionally published, which answers the copy-editing objection directly, and it has more than 60% more readers behind it than this one.
There is no audiobook in any format — not on Audible, not on Libro.fm, not on Chirp. The Amazon listing shows Kindle and paperback only.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does The Flames of Albiyon end on a cliffhanger?
Yes. The romance reaches a gentle landing but the conspiracy plot is left open, and no sequel has been announced, titled or dated in the five years since publication. Amazon labels it “Book 1 of 1”, which describes what exists rather than what the story needs.
How spicy is The Flames of Albiyon?
About a 2/5, and the evidence conflicts. romance.io has no entry at all. StoryGraph’s content-warning crowd flags sexual content as graphic, while readers describe the romance as low-key and one says the book reads on the young side even of young adult. We lean towards the readers.
Is The Flames of Albiyon a romance?
Not really. It is shelved as sapphic romance, but readers consistently report the relationship as a low-key subplot — one romance-first reader says so directly. Come for the dragons and the republic.
Is it on Kindle Unlimited?
No. It is available to buy (check today’s price on Amazon) and carries no Kindle Unlimited badge.
Is there an audiobook?
No. There is no audiobook in any format — nothing on Audible, Libro.fm or Chirp, and the Amazon listing shows Kindle and paperback only.
What should I read by this author instead?
The Lady of the Lake, a sapphic Camelot retelling published by Penguin’s Michael Joseph in May 2025. It sits at 3.60 across 704 Goodreads ratings, has considerably more readers behind it, and being traditionally published it answers the copy-editing complaint directly.
If You Loved The Flames of Albiyon, Read These Next
If the hatchling bond is what you came for and you want it finished, Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea starts a completed cosy quartet with dragon eggs running through it. If you want the same gentle register with a professional edit behind it, Hearts Forged in Dragon Fire is the traditionally published version of a similar book. And if the political worldbuilding was the draw, A Day of Fallen Night does statecraft and dragons at eight hundred and eighty pages.
For more in this register, browse our guide to dragon sapphic romantasy or the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
The Flames of Albiyon has ideas most dragon books do not bother with. A realm that overthrew its monarchy and then had to govern itself, a dragon that chooses its human inside the egg, and a Scottish register handled well enough that Scottish readers say so — those are three good things in a self-published debut. What sits against them is a book that four readers say falls apart editorially at the twenty-percent mark, a plot that several say does not start until the last forty pages, a secondary cast the crowd rates lowest of anything in this batch, and a cliffhanger that has now gone five years without resolution. Read it for the republic and the hatchling if an unfinished story does not ruin books for you. Otherwise the same author has a traditionally published Camelot novel waiting. Check The Flames of Albiyon on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, The Flames of Albiyon ranks as an inventive but unfinished indie cosy sapphic fantasy — warm, politically curious and blessed with the best hatchling in the category, held back by copy-editing and an abandoned cliffhanger, and best approached for Albiyon itself rather than for the romance.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★☆☆ 3.3/5
- ✓ 3.71 Goodreads average across 429 ratings
- ✓ Hopeful at 65%, flaws not a focus at 79%
- ✓ Post-monarchy setting genuinely original
- ✓ Four readers describe an editing collapse at 20%
Romance ★★★☆☆ 3/5
- ✓ Sweet, careful and entirely low-angst
- ✓ Two competent women, no manufactured conflict
- ✓ Reaches a landing even if the plot does not
- ✓ A subplot, and readers say so unprompted
Characters ★★★☆☆ 3.1/5
- ✓ Fia the hatchling outshines the humans
- ✓ 87% call the cast loveable
- ✓ Adairia’s scholarly competence rings true
- ✓ 50% to 34% on strong character development — weakest here
Writing ★★★☆☆ 2.9/5
- ✓ Scottish dialect praised by four readers
- ✓ Imprinting mechanic is a fresh idea
- ✓ A Scottish reader vouches for the dialogue
- ✓ Typos, punctuation and POV slips after the first fifth
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 3.5/5
- ✓ Readers reach for “a warm hug”
- ✓ Genuine hopepunk register
- ✓ The bond with Fia carries real feeling
- ✓ Two readers say nothing happens until the last forty pages
Heat Level ★★☆☆☆ 2/5
- ✓ Readers describe it as low-key steamy
- ✓ One says it reads younger than young adult
- ✓ No romance.io entry exists
- ✓ StoryGraph’s crowd flags sexual content as graphic — unreconciled
Ending ★★★☆☆ 2.8/5
- ✓ The romance does resolve
- ✓ Political stakes are real when they arrive
- ✓ Ends on genuine momentum
- ✓ Cliffhanger, and no sequel in five years
Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.2/5
- ✓ Comfort reading by design
- ✓ The republic rewards a second look
- ✓ Short and gentle enough to revisit
- ✓ Unresolved, and there is no audiobook
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