Blood of Tyrants by Naomi Novik

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Oh, Temeriaire, you sweet summer child-dragon (to mix together 2 vastly different dragon-containing series). Yes, you’re learning, but you still are way too optimistic about people, dragons, and battles.

This was one of the better Temeriare novels, although so far they’ve all been at least “good”. It started a bit rough. I thought this was going to be like the entry in the series where we start off with Temeriare in the breeding grounds and Laurence on a ship. But Novik has already put us through that wringer, so it was only a short portion of the book and which introduced us to the Japanese dragons. Here Novik leans on the asian association of dragons with water and so we get river and ocean dragons. The society seems halfway between the Chinese and South American dragon situation. They are revered, but aren’t necessarily living among the populace.

From there we go back to China for a bit and Novik takes advantage of the fact that we already learned the basics of Chinese/Dragon society to introduce us (finally) to Chinese military dragons.

After that real life history catches up with our story and Napoleon invades Russia and we get to see that society. It’s interesting to see where Novik deviates with history (Native Americans, Africa) and where it continues apace. That said, based on the dragon chaos, it remains to be seen how things end for Napoleon.

I’m sure I’ve said this before, especially with a long-running series like this one, but by this point you either like this series or you don’t. If you do, it’s a great entry. If you don’t – why are you torturing yourself by reading 8 books you don’t like?



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