After a long hiatus from fantasy (probably a year or even more), I’ve been reading a lot lately, or at least a lot more than I had been :) And I think I’ll blame it on John Lambshead’s Lucy’s Blade, and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, both of which re-awoke my like for fantasy, at least the urban kind.
This time, it’s another urban fantasy series, in which a pretty normal world has its (small or large) share of fantasy elements. In this particular case, it’s all about dragons, when we go into Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. The series is made up by three books so far:
The thing that made this series interesting to me at first was that it’s known as the Temeraire series…who is this Temeraire, star of the series? One of the dragons, actually. I don’t remember any other series in which a dragon is the main character, not even in a single book (if you do know of one, please post it in the comments, I’d love to read it :) and that singularity is what made me read the first book.
And…Naomi’s writing, character development, vivid battle scenes and very interesting view of the relationship between dragons and their riders, particularly between Temeraire and his rider and friend Captain Will Laurence, formerly of His Majesty’s Navy, are what made me read the other two, and be anxiously expectant of a continuation of this series.
From the acquisition of the dragon’s egg through the first harnessing of Temeraire all the way to the end of the last book, Naomi manages to make both characters people you end up caring about, making their triumphs and tribulations things you care about, and the deeper into the story you get, the more deeply you care.
From the very moment Temeraire breaks his eggshell, he’s a strange dragon by the standards of his world, and even tho by this time we don’t know a thing about the “standard dragon” of this universe, you’ll feel the strangeness through Will’s and his crew’s reactions to the dragon. Little by little, you start noticing strange details…until it all gets explained later on…and damn, he’s as close to unique as a dragon can be in a universe where they are bred for war.
Yup, for war….the Napoleonic Wars, to be precise. And we get to see at least once (in the third book) the genius of Napoleon applied to a war in which dragons are part…and damn, he’s good! :) (yes, Napoleon is one of my military heroes…he had delusions of grandeur, but he had the military genius to back them up for most of his life). On the other hand, Will Laurence and Temeraire are no slouches at the belic arts either, so things get to be fun.
Naomi also lets us look into the society of dragons, and the difference in the view of dragons between Europe and China, the unknown big monster on the other side of the world…and the difference make for a hell of a great storyline through books two and three, and most probably the rest of the series…being 1/4 Chinese, seeing the illuminated way in which the Chinese view and treat their dragons made me cheer :)
I truly hope Naomi keeps this series going…I can see it being a good series well into the 10th book, easily…worth every minute spent reading, and worth all the emotional investment that it’ll take from you while you get more and more involved in the life of Temeraire and all of his friends.
Tags: Books, dragons, fantasy, naomi novik, Reviews, temeraire
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!!
Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2007 at 5:49 pm and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
i love tamereire series i am 12 and i stay up till at least 11:00 pm ond sometimes 1:0 am reading i just finished empire of ivory and i want to know the title of book:5 and tell me where to get it
The 5th book in the series is “Victory of Eagles” and won’t come out until July, so it can’t be obtained anywhere right now, unfortunately.