Going just by the story, the characters, and my general entertainment throughout most of this book, I would have rated this at five stars. I’m giving it 4.5 stars, the same as the last two books, but I’m rounding down to 4 on Goodreads whereas I rounded the previous two up to 5. The reason I'm rating it so much lower, in spite of enjoying it so much, is that there were a couple things that particularly annoyed me, one being what I consider to be a major story discrepancy. More details are in the spoiler tags further below.
Aside from that, I thought the story was very entertaining. I enjoyed it at least as much as the first book, and slightly more than the second and third. I was especially engrossed by the end, and I’m eager to start reading the next book. Unlike the previous books, this one ended with quite a cliff hanger and I look forward to finding out how Laurence and Temeraire will get themselves out of their current predicament.
The rest of my comments include some spoilers for this book and also for the previous three, so I’ll put them in spoiler tags:
The discrepancy that bothered me so much was the way everybody completely ignored Temeraire’s history with the disease. Early on, when Laurence first learns that all the dragons are sick, he comments that they’d “had word” of the illness. This was true enough, I guess. In book two, when the courier dragon Volly landed on their ship to deliver messages, Volly was sick and his captain James said “half the dragons are moaning and sniffling about”. So, yes, they “had word”. They also had a nice little exchange of dragon germs.
Temeraire caught that same illness, about a week after Volly had left. In this fourth book, at around 28%, there’s finally a mention of Temeraire’s own illness, but everybody still seems to doubt the connection. Nobody mentions that Temeraire caught it after being exposed to one of the sick dragons. The connection seems like it should have been obvious, if only to Laurence and the dragon surgeon Keynes who had been with them. It seemed to me like Novik cheated, trying to drag things out for dramatic effect at the sacrifice of logic and consistency.
A more minor thing that niggled at me was the misrepresentation of where Laurence’s wealth came from. Novik really downplayed how much of it came from his capture of Temeraire’s egg and the subsequent harnessing. We’re told that the Admiralty pays little for the capture of a dragon compared to that of a ship, and that “Laurence had established a handsome capital while still a naval officer.” These things are technically true, but presented in a misleading way. Laurence didn’t capture a dragon, he captured an egg, and most of his wealth came from that bounty rather than from the capture of the ship itself, which admittedly happened while he was “still a naval officer”.
Along those same lines, Temeraire also mentions in this book that Laurence bought his breastplate with the money he earned from taking the French ship, but he knows the money came from his egg. In book one Laurence told him, after presenting the gift to him, that “it is quite your due, you know, for the better part of it comes from the bounty for our having taken your egg from the French.” So again, everything stated is technically true, because the egg came from the ship, but presented in a way that seems intentionally misleading. Maybe Novik was afraid reminding readers of that aspect of things would take away from the anti-slavery message in this book, or maybe I just read too much into it, but it seems odd that she would remind readers of some aspects of Laurence’s capital but avoid mentioning the most relevant aspect at the same time.
(show spoiler)
Next Book
Victory of Eagles by Naomi Novik, the fifth book in the Temeraire series.
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