In The Vanishers' Palace

[psocoptera]

In The Vanishers' Palace, Aliette de Bodard doing Beauty and the Beast, only they're both women, the beast is a dragon and doesn't need to be transformed (at least not in a shapeshifty way), and the Beauty character is there to teach her children. I expected to really like this from everything I knew about it and then it didn't quite click for me. The imagery was abstract in a way that confused me, I never quite felt the chemistry of the central romance, the worldbuilding and some of the stuff going on with some of the other characters was interesting but that's not where the story was centered, there was a lot of stuff going on about disease and treatment that I felt like I wasn't quite connecting with, I dunno. This is not quite a dis-rec - it's a short (48k) f/f fantasy novel with interesting stuff going on by de Bodard, if that's relevant to your interests you probably do want to read it - but, I dunno, it's not exactly a glowing rec, either, alas.