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Throne of Jade (Temeraire, #2)Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


More alt Napoleonic War with Temeraire, the princessiest dragon that ever princessed, and the former naval captain he loves. Except now the Chinese want to take him back.



So . . . it turns out I don’t really like travelogs. And that takes away a lot of the interest in these books, because to me, a lot of this comes across as, “and then they sailed for a while, and then there was a storm, and then they had a fancy ship dinner, and then they sailed some more.” I mean, it’s all functional and it’s all doing work, it just doesn’t work for me.



The thing I do find interesting here, though, is how much these books don’t feel like animal companion fantasies. I mean, they don’t make me want to go reread Pern (shut up, it happens sometimes!) because they aren’t really getting at *gestures* that thing. If anything, these books actually slot more into the category of alien companion because of the way they focus on cross-species intelligences trying to understand each other.





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His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire, #1) 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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