Note: I know the author socially.
A delightful book of short stories, drabbles and visual art in the Temeraire universe! Something like methadone for me as I attempt to recover post-series. I don't have many deep thoughts about any of this other than what a nice time!
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
I have finished the series ;____; this is both great and terrible. As is almost always true of this author, I got to a point in the final part of something she's written and thought how on earth is she going to pull it all together in a satisfying way? And as always, boy did she pull it off. The resolution to the war is incredible, the future that we see glimpses of feels both right and earned, and there's no sense of the rules of the world having to be broken in order to give us this. Laurence and Temeraire remain among my favorite characters I've gotten to spend a whole series with, and finally reading this whole thing this fall was one of the nicest things I did all year.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
So Victory of Eagles gave me the joy of Temeraire thinking that Laurence is dead; this book gave me Temeraire in denial and a Laurence with deep, deep amnesia. I stayed up way too late reading because I simply could not pause until Laurence remembered his dragon again!! Honestly, I need to reread the whole thing because I simply could not appreciate everything as well as I might have because I needed to burn through it so fast.
Beyond that beloved, expertly deployed trope, the story of this book is so good, with betrayal and set ups and plotting and doublecrossing and just so much fun military stuff. I haven't really gotten into how good the melding of actual historically based warfare and aerial dragon strength is combined, but it's so impressive. One of my absolute favorites of the series.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
A quietly devastating entry in the series! I simply was not prepared to be fully losing a whole ship and a character who had been so important since the beginning, and it made me extremely stressed out about what might happen in the final two novels of the series. I loved the culture and the world that we see in South America, and the completely different social structure between humans and dragons they find there, and the way Temeraire continues to incorporate it all into his goals and aims for dragon rights. We also get the Granby reveal, which is truly one of my favorite things in the entire series, because the men are so overwhelmed by it and the dragons are just completely nonplussed. A delight!
Grade: A
This past year I read and watched a lot of media about World War I, which is an era that I keep thinking about in part because of what we're currently going through globally. This is a book I got from the library when I decided to just request everything they had that had been written by Ben Macintyre after I read The Spy and the Traitor, and it really knocked me out.
It's structured as a mystery -- who betrayed these four British* soldiers hiding in a French village during WWI -- and while the question of who might have done that and why, and what proof we have one way or another a hundred years later, is certainly key to the narrative of the book, I found so much about the story to be fascinating. In particular, the inability to know and even less to believe what was happening in war just ten miles down the road, the horror when that reality came crashing into a small provincial town, the way the war was the worst elements of modernity obliterating the literal landscape of people's worlds -- all of it is explored and excavated in truly painful and awful ways. A great book that fucked me up and made me want to read so much more about this time.
*One of them was Irish, but technically for the time that meant he was considered to be British, but it still made me twitch every time the author collectively referred to them as such.
Grade: A
What a lovely, kind book about existing in 2025.
This is in many ways a classic chicklit book of the 2000s, but with a contemporary worldview of work and relationships and how being an adult feels in the venture capitalism reality of media. Our protagonist is Cecily, a great podcast producer who got fucked over by her ex-boyfriend and former creative partner and is now letting other people control her career path. Her boss makes her do a podcast that purports to make over her life and find her a boyfriend, essentially, but at the same time she has an incredible meetcute with a man with a giant dog. The process of how she finds her way to herself and to having a relationship with the guy who actually deserves her is just so, so nice, and the conflict is both real and never so stressful that I couldn't enjoy the process. Just does exactly what you want it to, written by someone who clearly knows from the world she's depicting.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
Another travelogue part of this series! This one takes place in Australia, and there's a lot of good stuff in it but it's also a bit harder for me just because Laurence is still taking all of this so hard and also I want the other asshole British dudes to suffer more!!!! But the stuff that works fucking works, and I had a great time reading it!
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially.
Everything that made the prior book in this series hard makes this book absolutely delicious for me. Laurence and Temeraire accepting the punishment for their absolutely morally righteous decision and then suffering even more because Temeraire thinks Laurence is dead and loses his fucking mind is incredible. The reunion!!! The emotions!! The continued consequences and depression that is only alleviated by the fact that they have each other, the triumph at the end at a moment when all looks lost, just an absolute delight from start to finish. Among my favorites of the whole series.
Grade: A
Note: I know the author socially
I am fairly certain that I read about half of this book when it first came out, put it aside with the intention of returning to it, and then never did. And honestly, I understand why; it deals with a lot of very heavy stuff! Primarily but not entirely connected to the kidnapping and enslavement of West African people by European and colonial powers, with a whole bunch of dragon plague and death to boot. There's a seriousness and a reality to the narrative, and I both admire it and clearly didn't want to deal with it however many years ago I first tried it.
It's an important book within the larger story of the series, though, and without it I think the series would have been taking the easy way out. The ending also demonstrates the great moral fortitude of both Temeraire and Laurence, especially the way that Laurence allows himself to be guided by his dragon, even when it goes against everything his own society has instilled in him. Very good but on the whole probably the book from this series I'm the least likely to reread outside of a full series reread.
Grade: B
I read this after watching all of the show, and while I was very happy I did purely from a desire to see how books are adapted into television shows or movies, boy does the book suffer in comparison. I don't really think it's the book's fault, though, and I also don't know how the show would have hit me if I had seen it in the 2010's rather than watching it post-Covid, and I don't know how much the book's clear commentary on how 9/11 and the subsequent wars would have hit me differently in a time when I didn't know what was coming in later years. So many elements that probably played out as extreme satire or allegory just read as fact to me, and that's a weird place to be in! It did make me want to read other books by this author, though, who has a view into Gen X suburbia that I think is very interesting.
Grade: B