Throne of Jade
30 September 2015 03:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeThrone of Jade" by Naomi Novik -- this is a sequel to her brilliant "Temeraire" (Hornblower-with-dragons), but I ended up reading the third one in the series first because the library didn't have a copy of this one. I might have to go back and reread "Black Powder War", as a lot of the references in that now make more sense!
Novik does the classic fantasy sequel trick by sending her heroes off to a new location so that she can do a whole new batch of world-building, having spent much of the first book establishing her alternate-history England and the effects of the dragons on its social structure. Here, Temeraire goes to China (he is a Chinese dragon, after all) and we get to see a whole new attitude to dragons, along with some complicated and nuanced politics.
Having more or less found his feet in the Aerial Corps (and had all his social assumptions turned upside down) in the first book, Laurence now has to cope with an entirely different situation and question some more of his beliefs: one of the things that I love about these books is that Will Laurence isn't a modern-day character plonked down for reader identification purposes but is a very recognisable man of his era, and his 'bromance' with his dragon is very much in the vein of uninhibited male friendships of the day -- openly affectionate without a hint of sex in it.
And the reader, who has also taken the world-as-described for granted -- having only seen it through Laurence's eyes -- is also led to revisit everything...
Novik does the classic fantasy sequel trick by sending her heroes off to a new location so that she can do a whole new batch of world-building, having spent much of the first book establishing her alternate-history England and the effects of the dragons on its social structure. Here, Temeraire goes to China (he is a Chinese dragon, after all) and we get to see a whole new attitude to dragons, along with some complicated and nuanced politics.
Having more or less found his feet in the Aerial Corps (and had all his social assumptions turned upside down) in the first book, Laurence now has to cope with an entirely different situation and question some more of his beliefs: one of the things that I love about these books is that Will Laurence isn't a modern-day character plonked down for reader identification purposes but is a very recognisable man of his era, and his 'bromance' with his dragon is very much in the vein of uninhibited male friendships of the day -- openly affectionate without a hint of sex in it.
And the reader, who has also taken the world-as-described for granted -- having only seen it through Laurence's eyes -- is also led to revisit everything...