I am beyond excited to be welcoming Jo Gatenby and the blog tour for her book, Dragon Kin’s Choice.

What do you do when your world expands, but your choices shrink?

When an orphaned dragon bonds with fourteen-year-old Tad, who never knew his parents, they believe they’ve finally found the family they’d never had. However, there’s more to them than they realize, and that might be the very thing which tears them apart.

Meanwhile, the duke’s daughter, Marian, struggles to avoid an arranged marriage. In trying to escape her fate, the truth is revealed, and she is forced to reconsider everything she thought she knew.

And although the prospective groom’s younger brother, Aldoran, is resigned to being the ‘spare heir’, he’s restless and bored. Drawn into a web of secrecy, he struggles to rise above his father’s expectations and complete his mission.

When these four lives converge, their choices reshape each other—and the world around them—in ways none of them could have predicted.

*****

Jo has shared an extract with us today. We hope you enjoy. 

beginning of extract

While the main character of my novel is a newly hatched dragonet who doesn’t even know the names of things—or even how to speak—one of my favorite secondary characters is Tad, the teenager who will become her bondmate.

This excerpt takes place shortly after we meet him and his friends, and learn that he can sense the emotions of others. He’s just jumped into the quarry lake and is still underwater when he glimpses her.

I’ve also used square brackets and italics [like this] to indicate mind-speech throughout the novel. You’ll also notice Tad’s peasant dialect. I wanted this to bleed into the prose slightly, giving the narrative the flavor of his speech without becoming distracting. So you’ll notice the was/were grammatical reversals, along with expressions such as if’n, mayhap, or certain sure woven throughout.

I hope you enjoy their very first encounter!

*****

A flicker of movement caught his eye. His body gently rocked side to side, and he glimpsed a large black form racing below him. Startled, his open senses registered curiosity—and an alien wisp of loneliness—from a thing what certain sure weren’t human.

Continue reading →

by