9.13.2013
Blood of Tyrants
by Naomi Novik, 431 pgs, hardcoverSeries: Temeraire book 8
Overall Grade: A
It's hard to tell if this is truly the penultimate book in the Temeraire series, but until further clarification I will act as if it is.
When last we parted ways from Laurence, Temeraire and company, they were headed to China from South America. Novik spares us the tedium of narrating the trans-Pacific crossing and suddenly dumps the reader and characters on and near Japan. Laurence has somehow been washed ashore in feudal Japan, and for those readers not also enamoured with Japanese history/culture that was an era when Japan was so isolationist that Westerners were only allowed in one port and were likely to be executed if they turned up anywhere else. And if that isn't torturous enough, he has amnesia and doesn't remember any of the past ten or so dragon-ful years of his life. Meanwhile everyone else is stuck on a ship stuck on the rocks in inclement weather. Thus begins the story!
'Blood of Tyrants' is broken up into 3 parts taking place in Japan, China and Russia sequentially. Unlike several of the other novels in the series (I'm looking at you 'Throne of Jade' 'Black Powder War' 'Tongues of Serpents'), Novik is light on the travel narration. This means that the story does take some geographic and chronologic jumps. (I would have read it w/o jumps but then I adore Patrick O'Brian's novels and The Silmarillion :-P ) In hindsight, I felt this rushed the pacing of the novel, but it doesn't feel that way during the reading when it seemed like they spent forever in Japan and I just wanted them to get to China already. Is this pacing a signal of the series headed into denouement? The novel does end with Laurence and Temeraire in the midst of fighting Napoleon's forces in Russia. (I don't feel like that is a spoiler because, while Novik has and is re-writing some history she's not completely ignoring how the Napoleonic Wars went.)
How will it all turn out in the next book? I don't know, but I will have The 1812 Overture queued for epic dragon warfare!
Haha! Look how much I've written! Temeraire books get such thorough reviews from me!
Labels: genre: fantasy, genre: fiction, genre: historical, media: book, series: Temeraire
