#WhyIReadRomance Day 4 - most empowering/empowerment

a Parajunkee event

The romance with the most empowerment/that is the most empowering

Dragon Actually by G.A. Aiken

It's not always easy being a female warrior with a nickname like Annwyl the Bloody. Men tend to either cower in fear - a lot - or else salute. It's true that Annwyl has a knack for decapitating legions of her ruthless brother's soldiers without pausing for breath. But just once it would be nice to be able to really talk to a man, the way, she can talk to Fearghus the Destroyer.

Too bad that Fearghus is a dragon, of the large, scaly and deadly type. With him, Annwyl feels safe - a far cry from the feelings aroused by the hard-bodied, arrogant knight Fearghus has arranged to help train her for battle. With her days spent fighting a man who fill her with fierce, heady desire, and her nights spent in the company of a magical creature who could smite a village just by exhaling, Annwyl is sure life couldn't get any stranger. She's wrong...

G.A. Aiken is really, really good at empowering her female characters in the Dragon Kin series. A lot of them are badasses to start with but not always, and the ones that aren't physical badasses she does a great job of empowering them in other ways. Dagmar who is introduced in the third book of the series, for example, is the smartest of all of the characters and the absolute best at strategy but she starts off living in a place where none of that matters just because she is a woman, so her empowerment comes through being able to get out of that environment and going somewhere where they encourage her. Dragon Actually is the first book in the series and I would argue that it is the best of all of them at empowering its main character. Annwyl starts off as being a good warrior but she also has a really dark backstory of abuse at the hands of her brother and father. Her empowerment comes through Fearghus's mentoring and training. He helps her to be able to deal with that past and channel it so that she can take on her brother and father and free herself from them.