Book recommendation: His Majesty's Dragon

I just finished His Majesty's Dragon, Book 1 of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik. Outstanding! In the fantasy/alternate history genre, it's hard to get better than this; set in the Napoleanic Wars, with all the attendant pagentry of the era...but with dragons. Not bad at all, and the dragon characterizations are excellent. I bought this first one when were at the bookstore just last night; I'd been eyeing it occasionally, but never gotten around to buying it. Stayed up late last night with it and finished today (it's a quick read), and just ordered the rest from Amazon.

Recommended. It's apparently the author's first book as well, which impresses me. Her style is very light; doesn't get in the way of the story. It reminds me a bit of the Horatio Hornblower/Master and Commander stuff (the human protagonist is a British Navy Captain that ends up a dragon rider); she does a good job of exploring the era's military and class issues in way reminiscent of those books. But it ends up a fun and easy read with characters I like (even some who aren't that important to the plot...always a sign of a good author IMO).

Book 5 in the series, Victory of Eagles, is out later this year...I hope the series continues to entertain. I always enjoy having a book to look forward to!

posted by Ken Kennedy at Feb 18th 2008 1:40 a.m.

Old comments (new comments via Disqus)
  1. Joseph DeCarlo commented 8 months, 3 weeks ago

    Ken,

    This looks like a pretty good book. I don't know if you are into audio books or not, but Audible.com has the first four of this series which, by the last sentence in our post, would indicate all of the available ones.

    Check it out.

    --Joe.

  2. Ken commented 8 months, 3 weeks ago

    Yeah, I played around with the audio book thing a zillion years ago (I actually have one of the original Audible readers somewhere at home), but I don't really do that much anymore. Plenty of podcasts, though. Lee does the audio book thing.

    Thanks for the comment though! And if you like that sort of fiction, I'd definitely recommend those audiobooks; I expect they'll read aloud well.

 
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