Too much dry travel writing, not enough DRAGONS for my taste

3.5 stars

Purported to be the first of Lady Isabella Trent’s journals, chronicling her life-long exploration of the world and its dragons, this book is a historical novel set in an alternate universe, where dragons obviously exist. I’m unsure of whether the time period in these books would be the Regency or more like Victorian times in our history, but the fictional country that our protagonist, Lady Isabella is from, is clearly modelled on historical England. We follow our heroine from childhood, where we learn how she first became fascinated with dragons.

Later, we see her during her first season, where she meets a fellow dragon enthusiast, and her unorthodox interest actually lands her a husband. She becomes Lady Camhurst and after a personal loss early in their marriage, Isabella and her husband go along on an exploratory mission to Vystrana (a country clearly modelled on somewhere in Eastern Europe) to find out more about rock-wyrms.

Vystrana is fairly miserable place, from Lady Isabella’s descriptions, a land of superstitious peasants, who mostly fear the large predators in the area (and rightly so). Apparently, the rock-wyrms have been behaving a lot more erratically and aggressively of late, attacking and injuring, and even killing some of the local populace. The locals are generally quite taciturn and unhelpful, until they come to hope that the foreign expedition may figure out the reason for the dragons’ increased hostility and might be able to stop it.

I’ve heard so many complimentary things about this series, and really, it’s historical novels involving dragons! How could they not be awesome? Answer: they focus far too much on the mundane details of Lady Isabella’s everyday life.

Full review here.