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His Majesty's Dragon (Temeraire, #1)

Naomi Novik

Start date: November 30, 2013

Finish date: December 8, 2013

Discussion: BUDDY READS

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What Members Thought

Mar 22, 2012 Mpauli rated it liked it

Shelves: orga_read-in-2013, topic_military, topic_dragons, rating_3-stars, genre_alternate-reality, setting_western-european, genre_flintlock-fantasy

In this alternate reality series, the napoleonic era is enrichened by dragons. So, battles started way earlier being not only fought at land and sea, but also in the air.

As british navy Cpatain Laurence seizes a french frigate, a dragon egg is found within and it's about to hatch. As dragons bind to the first person that is able to harness them, Laurence unexpectately becomes the handler of Temeraire, the dragon inside the egg.

For Laurence this means that his life as a navy captain is changed up In this alternate reality series, the napoleonic era is enrichened by dragons. So, battles started way earlier being not only fought at land and sea, but also in the air.

As british navy Cpatain Laurence seizes a french frigate, a dragon egg is found within and it's about to hatch. As dragons bind to the first person that is able to harness them, Laurence unexpectately becomes the handler of Temeraire, the dragon inside the egg.

For Laurence this means that his life as a navy captain is changed upside down. He has to swap to the Air Force and his whole life starts spinning around Temeraire.

This book has some really good parts, which I enjoyed a lot. The relationship between Laurence and Temeraire is really great and the book has several "Awwww" moments, where young Temerarire is especially cute, if you're into that sort of thing.
The second really strong part is the world-building. On the one hand, Novik pictures a really believeable napoleonic world. The language and the habits of the people seem apropriate and you can see that she put a lot of work into the history.
From that point she does a great job in showing how the inclusion of dragons and aerial combat would fit into warfare. Dragons are really huge in her world and don't have a single dragon rider. Every dragon is manned by an entire crew with top- and bottom-men, gunners, flag messengers and a ground crew.

Nonetheless, the whole maneuvering in the sky with boarding parties etc. didn't really work for me. At some points I couldn't really follow how the soldiers are doing all the things they're doing while being harnessed to the dragon in a rather complicated carabiner based system. That had the effect that I started to glance of, when the maneuver or fighting scenes went on for too long.

And as interesting and sweet as the scenes are, where dragons are involved, I didn't really click with the scenes without them. The really stiff navy way of Laurence made him a well developed character, but reading about him was a bit boring at some points.

Nonetheless, His Majesty's Dragon was a very enjoyable read for me and I'm definately going to revisit the series, as I saw that Novik is going to show us a lot of different parts of her dragon infested flintlock world.
The 3 stars are very strong 3 stars, almost 4, but in comparism to other books I rated 4 stars, the novel was not just there yet for me. ...more

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