Though I’m writing reviews for Books 4-7 all at once, and posting separately, I haven’t mentioned until now that the regular cast of characters besides Temeraire and his human buddy Will Laurence has really grown to a large group of familiars. I have to give giant props to Naomi Novik for building a world of details easy to absorb and remember, and still read super quickly. This book, number 7 of the series, brings us to South America, one of the few continents not yet visited […]
Temeraire Down Under
Let’s be real: Temeraire is the Forrest Gump of dragons. He goes everywhere, just when the action where he happens to be is most important. World history hinges on his behavior. He meets all the famous people and gets to be on a first name basis with all of them. And we get to go with him and see the entire world. THE ENTIRE WORLD! This time, we get on a dragon transport and travel with Will Laurence and Temeraire to Australia. Having had a […]
But how does a dragon feel about going into battle?
Back into battle with Laurence and Temeraire! Napoleon’s the bad guy! Easy and fun to read! But wait, first we have to get Laurence and Temeraire back together, because Laurence has been sentenced to death for treason for saving all the dragons in the world (<cough>Mary Sue<cough>), and Temeraire is moping in the breeding grounds in Wales. This is an opportunity for Novik that she jumps all over, and I think the reader is the big winner: we finally get to read from Temeraire’s POV. […]
The hunt for penicillin, and the kidnapping of Laurence
Onward with Temeraire, this time into the depths of the African continent! Today I’m writing four reviews, covering Books 4-7, so it’s all a little overlap-y, but one of the wonderful thing about what Naomi Novik is doing with this series is that she’s truly writing stand-alone books that also happen to build on each other. So, this one, Empire of Ivory, which is Book 4 of currently 8 in the series, takes our heroes, Will Laurence the human and Temeraire the wonderful dragon on […]
The British in the Sky with Dragons vs Napoleon
After reading and loving Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, I decided to check out her other series. While the first Temeraire novel does not have the level of clever dialogue and characterization of Uprooted, nonetheless, His Majesty’s Dragon is a decent adventure/historical fiction/fantasy. The basic premise is that a British naval captain Will Laurence captures a French ship that has on board a dragon egg about to hatch. In a nod to Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series, the dragon must bond with a human almost immediately after it […]
Jane Austen Meets Fantastic Beasts
I basically fell in love with this book as soon as I saw its cover. As a kid, I had very well-worn copies of Dragonology and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them that are probably to blame for my love of fictional memoirs, histories, and the like from fantastical settings. As such, I was pretty stoked about this book, and committed to it from the start. Imagine my pleasant surprise when it exceeded even my own very biased expectations. Read the rest at Women […]