For some reason I had it in my head that this was going to be the last of the Temeraire series. Not really sure why I thought that – evidently Ms. Novik plans to have probably nine of them before she’s done. She must have many, many facts in her brain to want to write so many books (even though she’s now ditched history entirely).
Yes, at this point she has abandoned real history in favor of stuff that’s more fun, which, hey, I’m completely fine with. It would be silly to accept dragons and then complain that Napoleon had invaded London, so I have no complaints about Napoleon invading London. Unless he starts tearing down things that I like, or doing something wicked on the area that will someday grow into the South Bank, my favorite bit of the world.
I enjoyed this book nearly as much as I did the first one. Temeraire’s a point-of-view character now, off and on, which was fun given how cute Temeraire has always been. He’s a mighty community organizer dragon these days, organizing the breeding ground dragons into a bunch of fighters for fighting off the wicked French armies. It was refreshing to have everybody winning battles and having clever ideas, instead of all systems devolving into chaos, as has been the case so much in the last few books.
As much as I was looking forward to seeing Iskierska in this book, I thought she was wasted. You saw a good bit of her, but she wasn’t really doing that much – or no, I guess what I would say is that I wanted to see her grow up and become useful and clever and do cunning things, and she really didn’t. She was just a nuisance, requiring to be watched and rescued, and I wanted her to be a mighty fightin’ power! Maybe in the next one. I like her and I want her to come into her own at some point.
The books continue to be entertaining. I continue to like them enough to reserve them at the library but not enough to actually purchase them at the store.