3.5 stars From Goodreads: Magic has broken free all over the Twelve Kingdoms. The population is beset by shapeshifters and portents, landscapes that migrate, uncanny allies who are not quite human…and enemies eager to take advantage of the chaos. Dafne Maillouix is no adventurer – she’s a librarian. But the High Queen trusts Dafne’s ability with languages, her way of winnowing useful facts from a dusty scroll, and even more important, the subtlety and guile that three decades under the thumb of a tyrant taught […]
Dragonopolis Sounds like Every Fantasy Nerd’s Idea of Heaven
I could almost swear that I’ve read this book before, except that I haven’t according to Goodreads. It is entirely possible that I read a hardcover copy of the book and simply forgot to mark that down, but I’m still not really sure. Even though the book feels very familiar, as if I’ve read it before, nothing in it really triggered the certainty that I actually have and so I’m left with this uncomfortable feeling of uncertain déjà vu. The book, and its follow up, […]
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 […]
Beware an adolescent dragon with Thoughts about Injustice
Anything is better with added dragons, right? This series adds dragons to historical fiction, and it works wonderfully. Napoleon has French dragons! England has British dragons! There are dragon battles by sea and by air. It’s all pretty tremendous, and it’s anchored by dragon Temeraire and his British captain Laurence. Laurence was in the Navy, but when his ship captured a French vessel and took its dragon egg as spoils of war, he ended up with an unexpected hatchling that bonded/imprinted on him, and now […]