Book: A natural history of dragons
Nov. 14th, 2013 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Marie Brennan (swan_tower)
Details: (c) 2013 Bryn Neuenschwander; Pub Tor 2013; ISBN 978-0-7653-3196-0
Verdict: A natural history of dragons is delightful fluff.
Reasons for reading it: I've enjoyedswan_tower's acerbic comments about bad historical fantasy, so I was intrigued to find out whether she can do it better. I liked the premise of a lady explorer investigating dragons. And then several people mentioned it in rachelmanija's post looking for genre novels with major Jewish characters (a discussion I intend to respond to properly), on the grounds that the setting is an alt history where Judaism is the major European religion. And I wanted something relatively light and pleasant to read after scaring myself with Ambient, so it seemed a good time to pick up from my to-read pile a book about a Jewish lady explorer who meets dragons.
How it came into my hands:jack lent it to me.
A natural history of dragons certainly met my expectations. It's a really endearing book, and both the dragons and the Jews are great fun. I agree withjack's assessment that it doesn't quite live up to its premise, though. I would say that aNHoD is very much the same sort of subgenre as Temeraire, the same gently period feel (and a roughly similar historial era), packaged in a way that's easily accessible to a modern reader, with nostalgia for a more elegant age the dominant note. The world-building makes a lot more sense than Novik's, not least because it's not trying to present a world with exactly the same history as ours even though dragons are present. There was nothing in the book that massively threw me out of its supposed setting, but the language and general assumptions about how the world works are mostly modern without being directly anachronistic.
Brennan holds an interesting line between portraying the gender essentialist and colonialist views of the setting, while making sure to appeal to a readership clearly expected to have egalitarian sensibilities. Isabella is a better than average take on the tomboy protagonists of a lot of historical fantasy; her preference for masculine interests such as science and adventuring is not just treated as obviously superior to those frivolous girly-girls who like embroidery and flirting with rich men, instead aNHoD goes some way towards exploring the consquences of her rejecting gender expectations. And of course there were female adventuring naturalists in the real-world equivalent of this era, so it's not just her super-special protagonist magic that allows her to succeed in a male-dominated sphere. There's a slightly cringey arc where she starts out quite snobby and comes to realize that assuming that the lower orders are inferior to people with titles is just as bad as assuming that women are inferior to men. There's a similar thing where the primitive peasants in the equivalent of Eastern Europe turn out to be real people after all. aNHoD is clearly trying, almost too hard, to avoid falling into the lazy steampunk trap of finding the pre-modern aesthetic cute while ignoring the harsh reality of colonialism and its effects on the people who weren't at the top of the heap. I sometimes found Lady Trent's voice a bit annoying, such as where she talks frankly about sexuality and includes a disclaimer about how she's too old and too famous to bother being coy about that sort of thing. Which again feels like making the scaffolding too visible in terms of making the setting accessible to modern readers without being too anachronistic.
The plot is swashbuckling and exciting, and Brennan isn't afraid to kill off major characters. But it didn't wholly grab me; a lot of the time it seemed like it was aiming for high stakes and just ending up with melodrama. I cared more about Isabella's personal growth and her relationship with her husband and her defying social expectations to become a naturalist, than I did about the myseteries around who was trying to drive them off from studying the dragons and the politics behind that and the smugglers and the corrupt Russian-equivalent ruling class. The central romance is rather lovely, in fact, I like the way that it's neither a grand passion with typical love story tropes, nor a pure marriage of convenience because those old time people never had personal feelings.
The dragons are not the greatest dragons I've ever seen, but certainly an interesting take on the concept. I like the way that they're arguably sapient, and the consequences of not being sure for the human characters. One of the best things about the book is Todd Lockwood's illustrations, which are really nice representations of the pencil drawings a self-trained naturalist building on her experience of ladylike drawing lessons might come up with. Having those rather than simply verbal descriptions of said drawings really adds something. I didn't entirely believe in Isabella as a scientist, though, even though she says all the things I would expect a scientist of the era to say.
The alt-history Jews I really enjoyed. It's subtly done, a lot of it could just read as made-up fantasy religion. But I like the fact that there are different denominations and that most people in the equivalent of western Europe are secular and culturally Jewish, without making a big thing about how Rational and Atheist they are. The persistence of the divide between priestly and rabbinic Judaism is a really nice piece of world-building. I fully expect to see aNHoD mentioned and then dismissed next time there's a bunch of non-Jewish SF/F fans pontificating about why there supposedly isn't any Jewish fantasy; it's a lot more subtle than Guy Gavriel Kay's alt-Jews and plenty of people don't count them either.
Overall I found aNHoD a pleasant read, but a bit on the frothy side.
swan_tower)Details: (c) 2013 Bryn Neuenschwander; Pub Tor 2013; ISBN 978-0-7653-3196-0
Verdict: A natural history of dragons is delightful fluff.
Reasons for reading it: I've enjoyed
swan_tower's acerbic comments about bad historical fantasy, so I was intrigued to find out whether she can do it better. I liked the premise of a lady explorer investigating dragons. And then several people mentioned it in rachelmanija's post looking for genre novels with major Jewish characters (a discussion I intend to respond to properly), on the grounds that the setting is an alt history where Judaism is the major European religion. And I wanted something relatively light and pleasant to read after scaring myself with Ambient, so it seemed a good time to pick up from my to-read pile a book about a Jewish lady explorer who meets dragons. How it came into my hands:
jack lent it to me.A natural history of dragons certainly met my expectations. It's a really endearing book, and both the dragons and the Jews are great fun. I agree with
jack's assessment that it doesn't quite live up to its premise, though. I would say that aNHoD is very much the same sort of subgenre as Temeraire, the same gently period feel (and a roughly similar historial era), packaged in a way that's easily accessible to a modern reader, with nostalgia for a more elegant age the dominant note. The world-building makes a lot more sense than Novik's, not least because it's not trying to present a world with exactly the same history as ours even though dragons are present. There was nothing in the book that massively threw me out of its supposed setting, but the language and general assumptions about how the world works are mostly modern without being directly anachronistic. Brennan holds an interesting line between portraying the gender essentialist and colonialist views of the setting, while making sure to appeal to a readership clearly expected to have egalitarian sensibilities. Isabella is a better than average take on the tomboy protagonists of a lot of historical fantasy; her preference for masculine interests such as science and adventuring is not just treated as obviously superior to those frivolous girly-girls who like embroidery and flirting with rich men, instead aNHoD goes some way towards exploring the consquences of her rejecting gender expectations. And of course there were female adventuring naturalists in the real-world equivalent of this era, so it's not just her super-special protagonist magic that allows her to succeed in a male-dominated sphere. There's a slightly cringey arc where she starts out quite snobby and comes to realize that assuming that the lower orders are inferior to people with titles is just as bad as assuming that women are inferior to men. There's a similar thing where the primitive peasants in the equivalent of Eastern Europe turn out to be real people after all. aNHoD is clearly trying, almost too hard, to avoid falling into the lazy steampunk trap of finding the pre-modern aesthetic cute while ignoring the harsh reality of colonialism and its effects on the people who weren't at the top of the heap. I sometimes found Lady Trent's voice a bit annoying, such as where she talks frankly about sexuality and includes a disclaimer about how she's too old and too famous to bother being coy about that sort of thing. Which again feels like making the scaffolding too visible in terms of making the setting accessible to modern readers without being too anachronistic.
The plot is swashbuckling and exciting, and Brennan isn't afraid to kill off major characters. But it didn't wholly grab me; a lot of the time it seemed like it was aiming for high stakes and just ending up with melodrama. I cared more about Isabella's personal growth and her relationship with her husband and her defying social expectations to become a naturalist, than I did about the myseteries around who was trying to drive them off from studying the dragons and the politics behind that and the smugglers and the corrupt Russian-equivalent ruling class. The central romance is rather lovely, in fact, I like the way that it's neither a grand passion with typical love story tropes, nor a pure marriage of convenience because those old time people never had personal feelings.
The dragons are not the greatest dragons I've ever seen, but certainly an interesting take on the concept. I like the way that they're arguably sapient, and the consequences of not being sure for the human characters. One of the best things about the book is Todd Lockwood's illustrations, which are really nice representations of the pencil drawings a self-trained naturalist building on her experience of ladylike drawing lessons might come up with. Having those rather than simply verbal descriptions of said drawings really adds something. I didn't entirely believe in Isabella as a scientist, though, even though she says all the things I would expect a scientist of the era to say.
The alt-history Jews I really enjoyed. It's subtly done, a lot of it could just read as made-up fantasy religion. But I like the fact that there are different denominations and that most people in the equivalent of western Europe are secular and culturally Jewish, without making a big thing about how Rational and Atheist they are. The persistence of the divide between priestly and rabbinic Judaism is a really nice piece of world-building. I fully expect to see aNHoD mentioned and then dismissed next time there's a bunch of non-Jewish SF/F fans pontificating about why there supposedly isn't any Jewish fantasy; it's a lot more subtle than Guy Gavriel Kay's alt-Jews and plenty of people don't count them either.
Overall I found aNHoD a pleasant read, but a bit on the frothy side.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-14 10:25 am (UTC)spoilers for setting and one major plot point
Date: 2013-11-14 10:53 am (UTC)There's a couple of language things which you might not pick up, quite a few instances of distorted Hebrew terms. The religion itself is called "Segulism" which is the Hebrew word for "chosen people" with a latinate ending. Also the names are all Jewish names (and none of them reference the New Testament or Christianity at all), but that alone doesn't prove very much.
Re: spoilers for setting and one major plot point
Date: 2013-11-14 11:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-14 11:36 am (UTC)Re: spoilers for setting and one major plot point
Date: 2013-11-14 02:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-15 06:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-16 07:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-18 10:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-14 12:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-15 06:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-15 03:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-15 06:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-11-15 06:41 pm (UTC)The last time I tried mixing up styles, I went to read Oscar Wilde directly after spending a week reading George Orwell. Seriously bad mistake; it put me off Wilde for a very long time.