A Natural History of Dragons
Mar. 14th, 2013 21:54Brennan, Marie. A Natural History of Dragons. New York: Tor Books, 2013.
ARC provided by the author, who is a friend of mine, on the condition that I would review it. Here it is! (Though, given how well it's been selling, I highly doubt that most people will need my remarks to make the decision whether to buy the book.)
A Natural History of Dragons is the first volume in the memoirs of Isabella, Lady Trent, the celebrated, pioneering (and female) dragon naturalist of a very cod-Britain where the dominant religion is based, for example, on Judaism.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks praised Brennan not doing the usual things in their review of Brennan's second-to-last book, A Star Shall Fall, and in thinking about it, I'm struck again by how much that applies, as praise, to this book as well. Most fantasy novels with feisty heroines whose souls rebel against the social constraints placed upon their gender make a point of their resistance to marriage; Isabella (although not without frank discussion of the soul-killing boredom it entails) submits to her mother's ideas of propriety after a rambunctious girlhood, and gets married within the first few chapters. Even more unusually for a female fantasy protagonist, she quickly gets pregnant--and has a miscarriage. It's after that, when Isabella is still grieving, that she persuades her tolerant husband Jakob that they should join the expedition of a prominent aristocratic naturalist to cod-Romania. The rest, as they say, is history.
A good chunk of the pleasure of this book is the richness of the setting and its details, particularly about the physiology of dragons; another is Isabella's very tart narrative voice (made even better that she's writing her memoirs in her august old age), and the gentle subversion of not a few tropes of this kind of travel writing, particularly as it was practiced historically. Brennan does more unexpected things with the plot and the denouement--since I went to see her at her reading at Borderlands Books, I can confirm that the series as a whole has an overarching plot of which only fragments are discernible in this book. But what's here is a lot of fun.
As a bonus, the book has ten absolutely beautiful interior illustrations by Todd Lockwood, who also did the gorgeous cover. People who say that traditional publishing has nothing to offer authors don't really realize how much a committed publisher can bring to the table, I say.
ARC provided by the author, who is a friend of mine, on the condition that I would review it. Here it is! (Though, given how well it's been selling, I highly doubt that most people will need my remarks to make the decision whether to buy the book.)
A Natural History of Dragons is the first volume in the memoirs of Isabella, Lady Trent, the celebrated, pioneering (and female) dragon naturalist of a very cod-Britain where the dominant religion is based, for example, on Judaism.
rushthatspeaks praised Brennan not doing the usual things in their review of Brennan's second-to-last book, A Star Shall Fall, and in thinking about it, I'm struck again by how much that applies, as praise, to this book as well. Most fantasy novels with feisty heroines whose souls rebel against the social constraints placed upon their gender make a point of their resistance to marriage; Isabella (although not without frank discussion of the soul-killing boredom it entails) submits to her mother's ideas of propriety after a rambunctious girlhood, and gets married within the first few chapters. Even more unusually for a female fantasy protagonist, she quickly gets pregnant--and has a miscarriage. It's after that, when Isabella is still grieving, that she persuades her tolerant husband Jakob that they should join the expedition of a prominent aristocratic naturalist to cod-Romania. The rest, as they say, is history. A good chunk of the pleasure of this book is the richness of the setting and its details, particularly about the physiology of dragons; another is Isabella's very tart narrative voice (made even better that she's writing her memoirs in her august old age), and the gentle subversion of not a few tropes of this kind of travel writing, particularly as it was practiced historically. Brennan does more unexpected things with the plot and the denouement--since I went to see her at her reading at Borderlands Books, I can confirm that the series as a whole has an overarching plot of which only fragments are discernible in this book. But what's here is a lot of fun.
As a bonus, the book has ten absolutely beautiful interior illustrations by Todd Lockwood, who also did the gorgeous cover. People who say that traditional publishing has nothing to offer authors don't really realize how much a committed publisher can bring to the table, I say.