Review: Before She Ignites by Jodie Meadows

Title: Before She Ignites (Fallen Isles #1)
Author: Jodi Meadows
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Publication Date: September 12th 2017 

Summary: 

Before. Mira Minkoba is the Hopebearer. Since the day she was born, she’s been told she’s special. Important. Perfect. She’s known across the Fallen Isles not just for her beauty, but for the Mira Treaty named after her, a peace agreement which united the seven islands against their enemies on the mainland. But Mira has never felt as perfect as everyone says. She counts compulsively. She struggles with crippling anxiety. And she’s far too interested in dragons for a girl of her station. After. Then Mira discovers an explosive secret that challenges everything she and the Treaty stand for. Betrayed by the very people she spent her life serving, Mira is sentenced to the Pit–the deadliest prison in the Fallen Isles. There, a cruel guard would do anything to discover the secret she would die to protect. No longer beholden to those who betrayed her, Mira must learn to survive on her own and unearth the dark truths about the Fallen Isles–and herself–before her very world begins to collapse.

First off the cover of this book is gorgeous. It has dragons in it. The narrator has horrible anxiety. I honestly don't now how I didn't pick this book up sooner. I want to say how badly I loved this book and that it was everything I was expecting. But that would be a lie. It fell short on a lot of things, and a book that was told to have lots of dragons had only very few dragons. 

The one thing I loved about this book was Mira and her journey with anxiety. Anxiety and panic attacks are some of the most scariest experiences you would ever feel, and as someone who has the very same condition as Mira it was easy to relate with her and her struggles. I saw so much of myself in Mira, how she thinks and how she acts and how she copes with her anxieties. Mira obsessively counts to help deal with her anxieties, it had become something that was a comfort to her. This is a behavior that is so normalized with anxiety but something that Mira takes a large amount of shame in. I loved the flashbacks when Mira would talk about dragons, it is her happy place that helps her. I really appreciated Mira's character and the way that Meadows betrayed her. 

Now......

I expected a lot of dragons but Mira spends a majority of the book in a dark prison where there are no dragons. I feel like there wasn't much plot, it was more of they day by day life of Mira's imprisonment and her desire to make friends with her silent neighbor rather then a novel about a girl who was imprisoned because of illegal Dragon trafficking. I felt like I knew nothing about the other characters other then Mira and to be completely honest I skimmed the last 150 pages of this book. 

As much as I love Meadows's writing in the past, Before She Ignites wasn't one that I can have a lot of love for and  I sadly don't plan on continuing the series.