Given is a 2020 young adult fantasy novel by Nandi Taylor.
Yenni Aja-Nifemi ka Yirba, warrior princess of her clan, has left her home on a quest to find a cure for her father's mysterious illness, travelling to the far-off Empire of Cresh to study their magic. She has no time for anything else.
One thing no one warned her about Cresh, however, were the dragons. There are no dragons left in the Moonrise Islands, so Yenni doesn't know about their ability to shift between human and dragon form. And she also doesn't know that every dragon has a "Given", a soulmate, which poses a problem when a dragon named Weysh claims that she is his Given...
Tropes:
- Amazing Technicolor Population: Dragons are all different colours. Weysh is technically purple, but his Sunrise Islands ancestry gives him darker skin that makes this less obvious.
- Arranged Marriage: Yenni expects to wind up in one with a prince of the Gunzu when she goes back home. Meeting Weysh changes things, however.
- Draconic Humanoid: The dragonkind can effortlessly shift between human and dragon form.
- Magical Incantation: Creshen magic is all about magic spells, as well as stuff written in books. Yenni finds it hard to wrap her head around since it's so different from the runes she grew up with.
- Magic Music: Sha Islands runes have to have a specific, wordless rune hymn sung during the painting process in order to work properly.
- One-Word Title: Given.
- Our Dragons Are Different: Dragonkind have both a human and a dragon form, and they can interbreed with humans. One dragon can only have one child, so two dragons who are married will have two children. Dragons also each have a "Given", or soulmate, that they always meet by the time they're thirty.
- The Quest: The tradition of Orire N'jem, in the Sha Islands, where a prince or princess will go on a quest for a year for some specific purpose, expected to support themselves on the journey. Yenni wants to cure her father's illness, although she has to ask the Sha (gods) for protection for her tribe so she can go.
- Red String of Fate: Dragonkind can identify their Given by scent. Yenni has never even heard of such a thing, however, so Weysh doesn't exactly make a good impression on their first meeting as he is unaware of her ignorance.
- Stay in the Kitchen: Yenni runs into several men, including the prince she's expected to be engaged to, who expect her to give up her warrior ways, which she has no interest in.
- Unequal Rites: Most Creshen mages tend to look down on Sha Islands runework. The difficulty of learning one type when you're used to the other definitely plays a factor.
