#BookReview: The Baby Dragon Cafe by A. T. Qureshi

The Baby Dragon Café (The Baby Dragon, #1) by A.T. Qureshi, Aamna Qureshi
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: cozy fantasy, dragons, fantasy, fantasy romance
Series: Baby Dragon #1
Pages: 317
Published by Avon on January 16, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

The perfect read for fans of Pumpkin Spice Café and Legends and Lattes!
When Saphira opened up her café for baby dragons and their humans, she wasn’t expecting it to be so difficult to keep the fires burning. It turns out, young dragons are not the best magical animals to keep in a café, and replacing all that burnt furniture is costing Saphira more than she can afford from selling dragon-roasted coffee.
Aiden is a local gardener, and local heart-throb, more interested in his plants than actually spending time with his disobedient baby dragon. When Aiden walks into Saphira’s café, he has a genius idea – he'll ask Saphira to train his baby dragon, and he'll pay her enough to keep the café afloat.
Saphira’s happy-go-lucky attitude doesn’t seem to do anything but irritate the grumpy-but-gorgeous Aiden, except that everywhere she goes, she finds him there. But can this dragon café owner turn her fortunes around, and maybe find love along the way?

My Review:

Saphira is in over her head – as first time business owners often are. The cafe she dreamed about owning is up and running – and running her ragged. She’s also discovered that living the dream is quite a bit different from dreaming that dream, which is where the story begins.

Like many of us who love reading or watching stories about friendly dragons, stories like The Dragonriders of Pern, Fourth Wing and How to Train Your Dragon, the idea of living in a place where dragons are really real and pretty much everywhere seems like, well, a dream come true.

Saphira lives in just such a place, Starshine Valley. Dragons really do fly overhead ALL THE TIME. But only the wealthy, powerful Drakkon families actually have their own dragons. For most people dragons are out of reach in more ways than one.

Which is where Saphira’s dream, the Baby Dragon Café, comes in. Baby dragons, just like any other intelligent creatures that live among human populations, need training. In the dragon’s particular case, they need to be trained to BE dragons, the gorgeous, HUGE flying and fire-breathing creatures they will become, while at the same time learning how to behave with their humans and the things, people and places that their humans hold dear.

Saphira envisioned her café as a place where baby dragons and their humans could come in to socialize while they’re having a drink and a snack. She was thinking of just how adorably cute baby dragons are. She rather underestimated just how accidentally destructive they can be while learning to control their fire-breathing as well as their gangly limbs.

Her insurance isn’t remotely covering the destruction.

Which is where Aiden Sterling and HIS misbehaving baby dragon, Sparky, come in. Literally. It begins with Aiden and Saphira believing they can fix each other’s problems – or at least their most obvious problems.

He desperately needs someone to train his baby dragon. A dragon who is the living embodiment of his younger brother, a charming, devil-may-care rogue of a dragon racer who died doing what he loved – upholding the family’s reputation as star dragon racers. Which, as much as Aiden loved his brother, Aiden himself wants no part of.

Saphira needs help. And money. And help. Which sounds more mercenary than it should – or than it turns out to be. The baby dragons she loves are tearing her café apart piece by piece, eating through her savings at an alarming rate. Without help, she’s going to lose her café, which embodies the dream that she and her late grandmother shared.

AND Saphira sees training Sparky as her likely one and only chance to bond – even a little bit – with a dragon of her (very briefly) own. People like her, people from outside the Drakkon families, have no avenues for having a dragon of their own.

And that’s EXACTLY the way that the powers-that-be of the Drakkon families like it. But Sparky has a mind of HIS own, too – and the “puppy dog eyes” to make it happen even if he has to train his own human to behave along the way.

Escape Rating B: I’ve written a LOT about how this story gets set up because it felt like there were a lot of stories thrown into this particular book blender to create The Baby Dragon Cafe.

The first (and second) are pretty obvious, right there at the top of the blurb. This is very much a cozy fantasy romance, and it is a bit in the shadow of Legends & Lattes – but mostly because that book popularized the cozy fantasy genre – something we all may be looking for a lot more of in the months ahead. (I certainly read this now (the ebook is available NOW and it’s only $2.99) instead of waiting for the July 1 publication date for the paperback) because I was looking for warm and cozy reads with happy endings this week.

But Legends & Lattes isn’t the exact comparison that leaps to mind. The Baby Dragon Cafe reminds me a LOT more of The Dallergut Dream Department Store and The Full Moon Coffee Shop in that all three worlds are very much contemporary worlds just dipped in magic. Dallergut has the dream shop AND the contemporary city that serves it, while Full Moon Coffee Shop is a magical place that drops in on the “real” world. And Full Moon is also steeped in the love of animals for their people, as this story is.

The romance wrapped around Saphira’s Baby Dragon Café is very, very cozy, but the magic of the world reads more like a coffee shop alternate universe fanfic than it does a contemporary small-town romance like the other book mentioned in the blurb, The Pumpkin Spice Café seems to be. Your reading mileage may definitely vary.

However, that leads back around to the love story, which is cute and sweet and kind of familiar in its friends-to-lovers romance between a shy and somewhat reclusive rich guy who leaves the airs and graces to his family and kind of forgets that he’s not really JUST an ordinary person and the woman he falls for who he recognizes as extraordinary even as the traditional society he comes from sees her as lesser because she’s not “one of them”.

I’m a bit torn about the romance. On the good side of that tear, it’s cozy, it’s sweet, little Sparky does an adorable job of being, well, adorable, as well as serving as a combination of motivation, glue and chaperon for his two humans. On the less good side of that ledger, Saphira’s relationship with Aiden has the potential to get VERY squicky as she’s working FOR him, and it does get squicky in other ways as he’s just SO VERY CLUELESS about all the ways that their little corner of the world sees her and their relationship.

On the neutral side, the story reads as if the dragons could have been dogs and it would have nearly as well. But I still LOVE the idea that it’s dragons and I wish we knew more about how this world works because the idea of it is just as adorable as it seemed in the beginning.

In the end, for this reader, Sparky and the baby dragons carry the day and the story. And I have hope that the one part of this story that niggled at me, the potential squickiness of their relationship and Aiden’s general cluelessness about his own position of privilege, will be less of a factor in the upcoming second book in the series, The Baby Dragon Bakery, as we’ve already met the main characters and know that they start the story on the same level, as well as the same level of cluelessness about whether they’re just best friends or have the potential for something more!

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