What She Saw, by Mary Burton | Free Audiobook
21 May 2026
Fever Dream (Emerald Lake, Book 1), by Elsie Silver | Free Audiobook
21 May 2026
Audiobook details
A moonfall is coming, and she has to decide whether to survive it
Raeve has blood on her hands and a name she doesn't yet know how to carry. With Rekk dead and the past she buried beginning to surface, she learns that a moonfall unlike anything the world has seen before is approaching, and she is being forced to make a choice she has avoided for years: whether to keep running toward death, or to finally decide she wants to live. Standing at that crossroads is Kaan Vaegor, who has always known who she really is, and who is fighting to hold his kingdom together while waiting for her to remember.
Raeve is Elluin Neván, a royal everyone believed had died, the long-lost love of a warrior king. That truth has been sitting in the bones of the Moonfall world since the first book, and The Ballad of Falling Dragons is where it finally becomes impossible to ignore. Raeve has to find out what happened to her, who buried her past and why, and whether the answer changes anything about who she has chosen to be. Meanwhile, allies are fragmenting, enemies are moving, and something ancient and entirely Other is waking beneath the surface of events that seemed to have a shape everyone understood.
Sarah A. Parker widens the scope of her world considerably in this second installment, bringing in new POVs and pushing the magic system that made the falling dragons so distinct into territory the first book only hinted at. The audiobook features six narrators, each anchored to a specific thread of a story that is visibly building toward something considerably darker than where it began.
I finished When the Moon Hatched in the kind of daze that makes you sit with a book in your lap for ten minutes before you can put it down. I started The Ballad of Falling Dragons two days after it released, and ran into the same problem.
Parker expands the cast and raises the stakes in a way that could easily become unwieldy, and to her credit it mostly doesn't. The new POVs are distinct and serve the story rather than padding it. The world gets considerably larger without feeling inflated, which is harder to pull off in a second book when you no longer have the advantage of everything being a revelation for the first time.
What I found most interesting is what Parker does with Raeve's identity. Knowing she is Elluin Neván changes the texture of every scene she is in, because she is now navigating a version of herself with two histories and only one body. The tension between who she has been and who she was is not played as a breakdown. It is written as a weight, and that choice makes it land differently than a more dramatic treatment would have. Raeve never stops being who she is. She just has to figure out whether who she was is something she can integrate or something she has to grieve.
The Kaan chapters carry their own quiet devastation. He has known the truth for what feels like the entire first book, and the cost of that knowledge is something Parker finally starts collecting on. His arc in this installment is less about action and more about what it does to someone to keep waiting for a person to remember them. It is unexpectedly affecting.
There is a moment roughly two-thirds in where two things the reader has been tracking separately since book one resolve at the same time. I will say nothing more about it.
Six narrators handle the expanded cast, and the production is clean. Sarah Mollo-Christensen carries Raeve across both timelines with the same controlled tension she brought to the first book, and the new voices integrate without making the POV shifts disorienting. Each change is immediately legible from the voice alone, which in a story this layered is not a small thing.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.
The Ballad of Falling Dragons by Sarah A. Parker picks up directly from the events of When the Moon Hatched, throwing Raeve and Kaan into the most consequential chapter of their story yet. Raeve is grappling with the truth of who she is, a presumed-dead royal with a past she barely remembers and a king who has been waiting for her to come back to it. Kaan is holding together a kingdom that is starting to fracture, as the most devastating moonfall in the world's history approaches and the people he needs most have gone silent.
Take advantage of the free trial, cancellable at any time, and listen to Sarah Mollo-Christensen, Fajer Al-Kaisi, Heather Firth, Caitlin Kelly, Corvin King, and Alexander Cendese bring this expanded cast to life. The six-narrator production keeps each perspective immediately distinct, and Mollo-Christensen's anchoring of Raeve carries the same intensity she brought to the first book.
The audiobook stays in your library even after the trial ends. The free trial also gives you access to thousands of other titles at no cost, with no commitment required. Start listening now.
More Fantasy Audiobooks
US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
