ICYMI: This series by Naomi Novik introduces vain, strong-willed, talking dragons, their complex, wonderfully faulted handlers, and wartime conflicts demanding bravery and loyal bonds between the beasts and their humans.
“It seems very strange that the ocean is full of things that one can eat as one likes, and on land everything seems to be spoken for,” Temeraire said.
In the first of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, we're introduced to Captain Will Laurence, a young, upstanding seafaring captain fighting in the Napoleonic Wars.
When his ship captures a French frigate carrying an unhatched dragon egg, Will finds himself in uncharted territory--and suddenly finds that he has a strange new future ahead, in the Aerial Corps as master of the dragon Temeraire.
Novik's dry humor comes through through the novel's irresistible Will-Temeraire interactions. Temeraire is young, greedy, vain, and outrageously loyal to Will, and Will is attempting to civilize Temeraire, while being inspired to reconsider traditions and expectations with new eyes because of Temeraire's fresh, disruptive point of view.
“I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on.”
I've read seven of the nine books in the Temeraire series, in which the dragons are haughty and greedy and intensely loyal to their riders; Novik explores world politics and the intricacies of nations' relationships and airborne dragon battles within the books' alternate history; and the human protagonists are wonderfully faulted and fantastic.
I'd love to hear your Bossy thoughts about this book!
Naomi Novik is also the author of richly wrought fantasy novels featuring main protagonists I love: Uprooted and Spinning Silver as well as the Scholomance series, A Deadly Education, The Last Graduate, and The Golden Enclaves.
The stories in her book Buried Deep revisit some favorite Novik worlds as well as introducing the world where Novik's future series takes place.
For more Bossy reviews of books about dragons, please check out the titles at this link.
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