“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Temeraire by Naomi Novik
HarperVoyager (2007)
342 pages

In short: it’s the Napoleonic Wars, except this time around there are dragons!

(Why the different titles for the British/American editions? The American version is called His Majesty’s Dragon.)

I’ve always loved dragons. The first time I heard the buzz about this book I went a little hyper and flailed around for a bit while I waited for it to appear in our local bookstore and wondered why no one ever came up with something like this before. After I bought the book, though, it lay in my to be read pile for such a long time despite the many times I tried picking it up.

I blame the back cover blurb. Oh, say what you want about not judging a book by its cover — it really doesn’t matter because you still do it anyway. (Is judging it by its back cover worse than judging it by its front cover, I wonder. I do so love this edition’s design.) But seriously. Let me see if I can find the offending sentence . . . here: “But when the newly-hatched [why the hyphen, idly asks the editor in me, though that's not the deal breaker] dragon decides to imprint itself on Laurence, the horrified captain’s world falls apart.”

Why, I thought sadly, Will Laurence doesn’t like dragons. This cannot mean well. And so I kept stalling — I kept picking the book up and putting it back down. It’s a very random reason not to start reading a book, really, but the very idea that the man who’ll be, according to this same blurb, “the constant companion and trainer” of the dragon not liking it just made me huffy. And I knew nothing at all about the rest of the story at this point. I have a very strange attachment to dragons, really. I think the people who kept nudging me to read the series must be gaping at the absurd excuse. (Imagine now how much I hate that fellow who actually mistreats his dragon in the book.)

All that aside: yes, I did love the book when I finally read it. The book starts at the tail end (ha!) of a fight between the Reliant, of which Will Laurence is the captain, and the French ship the Amitié which has just been captured. There’s a dragon egg on board of the captured ship, and to shorten things, let’s just say it hatches and the dragon — named Temeraire by Laurence — takes a liking to Laurence and Laurence actually likes him back (in a, uh, good dragon–human relationshippy way the dragons and the humans are supposed to be getting along in these books, that’s what I mean) and they have a lot of adventures. Good ones.

I’m no expert on the time period — Napoleonic Wars: did we even cover that in world history? — so I can’t say how faithful of not Novik is to the setting (with dragons or without), but it certainly feels real to me. I love the world she’s created, and the social commentary-ish parts she slips in.

And the characters! Oh man. I kept treading warily around Laurence at the start. It’s probably because of the way he speaks — he’s so formal and careful. A bit like the narrative itself, I guess. Then he calls Temeraire “my dear” and I melted into a puddle. The interaction between humans and dragons were wonderfully done; not just Laurence and Temeraire, but the other characters as well. That’s probably the best thing in the book, even with all the swashbuckling and the nifty moves.

I read Temeraire in February 2008. I’ve since read both Throne of Jade and Black Powder War, and the simple verdict is ♥. (The library doesn’t have a copy of Empire of Ivory yet.) I’d read whatever else Naomi Novik will write in a heartbeat, yes.