Dragons, Yeah. (March Reading)

[ase]

Three things to be doing, and no desire to do any of them. Must be book review time. Only I finished one book last month, and am making my way through A Short History of World War 2 two pages at a time.

Temeraire (Naomi Novik/naominovik): Published as His Majesty's Dragon in the US, but I read the UK HC, so it's going down with the English title. Captain William Laurence sort of accidentally harnesses a dragon, dumping him out of the familiar confines of His Majesty's Navy and into His Majesty's Aerial Corps (of wilder repute) as Napoleon's strategies unroll toward invasion.

What's supposed to sell the book is the Laurence-Temeraire relationship, and the foundation of their mutual affection escaped me even after I finished the book, until I considered some other fiction and figured out that Laurence isn't just an unreliable narrator, he's an insanely repressed British "stiff upper lip" unreliable narrator. In other words, Laurence isn't going to admit to having an emotion until he's on the duelling grounds, holding a smocking pistol and wondering why the other guy isn't getting up, and where did all the bullets go? I'm thinking there's been a certain lack of affection in Laurence's life to date, what with the dad issues and joining the Navy. Captain's lot is a lonely one & etc. Enter blindly adoring dragon, stage left, and voila, instant connection.

Moving on.

There are characters other than L. and T., and they're a reasonably drawn cast. I'm thinking there's some more of that unreliable narration thing going on in Harcourt's direction, and look forward to seeing some backstory unfold there. Laurence is an idiot with women, a fact which should surprise no one, so it'll be interesting to see if/how any 20th C feminism leaks through the worldbuilding. Some of that may already be there - the bad guys come by their evil reputations honestly, by doing things like upsetting the women and neglecting their dragons. If I were thinking about this harder, I could probably say a few words about - drat, the fop, if you've read the book you know the one - and the French guy, and how behavior towards dragons may be a useful "rule of thumb" character integrity measure.

So. Characterization pleasant, worldbuiling has a nifty twist, and the plot. Exists. Okay, that's shallow, but I didn't find this a particularly deep book! I probably should have seen Celestial twist coming, but since the difference is introduced in terms of status, rather than dragon characteristics, I don't feel that bad about missing it. I was all prepared to give not-MS points on the Imperial thing, and then - not so much. Point to Novik on that front. I'm disappointed that Novik didn't see fit to kill Nelson at Trafalgar, but I can't say I'm surprised. For some reason, Nelson doesn't die much in the AUs I'm familiar with. At this point, I'm predicting a cameo later in the series.

Spoiler-free summary: if you like that age of sail gig, you'll like this; if you're me, you're waiting on the second book, because the gossip is good, and poking around the reviews suggests that your lack of historical knowledge means you're missing setup stuff.

Something else that might be interesting to consider are the intersections of blogging/LJ, writing, getting three books out in one year, and sales numbers. There's been a fair amount of buzz in the end of the blogosphere I'm familiar with - the mad internet fangirls, who are sarcastic and get a little feminist and literary in their interpretations of canon - but it's going to be interesting to see how the sales numbers fall out. Rapid release of new material is a good way to raise a writer's profile, and yes, I'm trying to The ratio of books read because [person] on LJ wrote it vs. books read this year is getting alarming.

Comments

[norabombay.livejournal.com]

I liked it. I'll buy number two and three.

But something..

I kept waiting for the characters to take a turn into fanfic land.

[ase.livejournal.com]

Wait until you're reading Jamaica Kincaid for class and you're all, "mom-character, au pair, your emotional relationship is touching, but isn't this the part where we carry the postcolonial metaphor to bed?" Special Hell for me.