Mar 23 2009
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Life is weird sometimes. I stumbled upon The Coming of Dragons (The Darkest Age I) in the grocery store. As I happened to have dragons on the mind I found out that His Majesty’s Dragon (the first in a series by Naomi Novik) was available for free for [amazon-product region="us" text="Kindle" type="text"]B00154JDAI[/amazon-product]users. So grabbed it. Who cares if you don’t read it right away if it is free. A free book is a free book, etc.
But when I couldn’t get a hold of The Book of the Sword (Darkest Age II) right away I went ahead and kept the dragon theme going by reading HMD. It turned out to be a very interesting experience. I am a bit torn about the series but glad I read the book.
Here is what Publishers Weekly had to say:
In this delightful first novel, the opening salvo of a trilogy, Novik seamlessly blends fantasy into the history of the Napoleonic wars. Here be dragons, beasts that can speak and reason, bred for strength and speed and used for aerial support in battle. Each nation has its own breeds, but none are so jealously guarded as the mysterious dragons of China. Veteran Capt. Will Laurence of the British Navy is therefore taken aback after his crew captures an egg from a French ship and it hatches a Chinese dragon, which Laurence names Temeraire. When Temeraire bonds with the captain, the two leave the navy to sign on with His Majesty’s sadly understaffed Aerial Corps, which takes on the French in sprawling, detailed battles that Novik renders with admirable attention to 19th-century military tactics. Though the dragons they encounter are often more fully fleshed-out than the stereotypical human characters, the author’s palpable love for her subject and a story rich with international, interpersonal and internal struggles more than compensate.
As practically every reviewer has noted the genre here is really, as Rachel Hartigan Shea put it in her WaPo review, “the dashing Brits-on-ships genre perfected by Patrick O’Brian.” The dragons are the only fantasy aspect of the book and it really is historical fiction not fantasy. But for puting dragons in just such a setting Novik deserves credit because it is a creative twist and she pulls it off.
