His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik

His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
So I realize it is shocking that I haven’t read these books before since, everything else aside, the author is a friend and has read my writing. I actually picked this book up three or four years ago, not long after it came out, and dropped it halfway through because I was not in the mood and my brain chemistry was going to ruin something I knew I could enjoy.

And I was totally right. It turns out I was cleverly saving this series for a time of great need, and here it is. And I can see exactly where and why I put this book down before, but this time I was coming at it from a much more receptive place. (It was that this book’s chief flaw is taking pastiche sometimes over the line into flat out mimicry, so I who have read only a hundred pages of Patrick O’Brian in my life would mutter, “oh, right, this is the part where their training is interrupted by an emergency and they prove themselves to all,” and then five pages later, boom, there it was.)

Totally true, but this time around I was on board with that, and it was actually nice to be so comfortably familiar with a book I’d never finished. You know what I mean.

Temeraire, by the way, is the princessiest dragon that ever did princess.

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