More Temeraire feels

[unhappytriad]

Just finished Book 5 (Victory of Eagles). Spoilers behind the cut.

Oh, God, poor Lawrence. It just keeps getting worse.

Novik seems to take delight in cutting everything out from under her protagonist. His career prospects and professional respectability. His fiance (and his hope of ever having a settled family life with anyone). The support of his government, his colleagues, his family and friends. His personal integrity. Worse, there's so much collateral damage: every part of his life that collapses takes someone he cares about down with it. And the poor bastard can't even blow his brains out, because of Temeraire.

Now he's headed to Australia, where he's going to be expected to use the dragons to help subdue (enslave) the native population. Oh, THAT'S going to turn out well. If he doesn't end up giving dragons to the aborigines, I will eat the book.

This series is like an RPG in which the choices are "succeed at great personal cost" or "fail at great personal cost".

I have to give a shout out here to the Georgia PINES public library system, which has allowed me to read books 2-5 in spite of the fact that my own library's personal holdings are quite spotty. I just put a hold on Book 6 and should have it soon. PINES lets borrowers get any book from any library in the system free of charge, and return the book either to their own local branch or any other PINES library. Great for vacation reading. (My only quibble is that a lot of audio recordings aren't available for interlibrary loan. Y'all get on that!)

Comments

[jenavira.livejournal.com]

I was utterly heartbroken when I got to the end of Victory of Eagles - and worse, I had to wait for the next one to come out. Poor Lawrence! (But then...AUSTRALIA. Australia is great. Almost as great as Brasil.) You are encouraging me to reread this series; I love it to death, but much like Patrick O'Brian, I can never quite remember what happened in which book.