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A review by justabean_reads
To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose
adventurous
emotional
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Oh Lord. I just want to pinch this book's cheeks and pat it on the head.
My Wife: You read that really fast. Was it good?
Me: I mean, no, but it was terribly earnest in a way that I found incredibly calming.
That's probably a little unfair. It wasn't bad; it was just absolutely unconcerned with anything other than the author's wish-fulfilment progression fantasy novel. As long as you're happy to be along on that ride, it's pretty great!
Our heroine is from an Indigenous group living on Nantucket Island in the 1840s (more on this in a sec), when she finds a dragon egg! This is very exciting, because her people used to have dragons, but don't anymore due to smallpox (?). The dragon hatches, imprints on her, and then since her people don't have dragons anymore, she has to go to dragon school in... Boston (Maybe? I'm a bit fuzzy on east coast geography, and the cities all had different names, which point I'll come back to in a minute.) The heroine then proceeds to find out that everything about mainstream American culture in the 19th century pretty well sucks, points this out repeatedly, is always right, and basically never suffers any significant negative consequences for her actions. Also, she gets to dress up in pretty dresses with corsets and hoop skirts (I'm going to talk about worldbuilding, I promise), because her roommate is rich, and likes dressing her up. So we get our clothes porn and can eat it too. And she simultaneously courts the hottest boy and the hottest girl. I'm not sure if the author is old enough to have seen Titanic, but if she did, her favourite scene was definetely the bit where Rose goes below decks and realises that the poor people are having way more fun.
It reminded me a little bit of Arrows of the Queen or something similar, except Mercedes Lackey usually included a plot in her novels, and her heroines were occasionally known to have flaws.
(And, for the record, I do think that Wampanoag culture, even after the apocalyptic plague, probably had its shit together generally more than the Victorians, but neither a culture nor a heroine that has zero flaws or internal conflicts feels terribly grounded in reality.)
Speaking of grounded in reality! I loved that the book said in Naomi Novik's generally direction, "Okay, but adding great fucking domesticated dragons to European history would have made things fall out differently some time before the Napoleonic Wars! Also, if Britain doesn't have its colonies, it's maybe not an empire?" So in this world, the Vikings won the "how do we domesticate dragons?" race, and were one of the dominant European cultures, and colonised North America (now called something else) north of the Chesapeake, while the Spanish, who seem to be a lot more mixed with North Africans(?), colonised south of there. The smallpox thing still happened, leaving Indigenous communities reeling, but the European colonies haven't really spread past the Appalachians by this point. A lot of words in use different roots because "Anglish" is more Norse, Arabic scientists have gotten around, and very little Latin is used in any of the science. Most people still follow the Norse gods. It's on the whole a really nice mix of familiar and how things could have gone differently.
Except. Why is it 1843? Why, when Christianity doesn't seem to have taken off, are we using the Christian calendar? Why are there hoop skirts? Why are there dance cards and waltzes? If the culture is based on the Vikings, why are gender rolls and social mores exactly the same as they were in the English-extracted, French-influenced Christian Americas? I guess there's only so many things the author wanted to change while still leaving us with points of recognition, but it did feel like she could've gone a little bit further on the social stuff. She was happily taking potshots at how Victorian morality was fucked up (fair!), while not explaining why said morality even existed in this world.
I did like how the dragon stuff worked. The author clearly put a lot of thought into the science, and the ways different cultures might approach that. The dragons are a lot more like Pern, not quite sentient but also empathically bonded to their riders, than Temeraire, where they're people. No word on dragonflight-related fucking yet, though. I liked all the magical worldbuilding around dragon breath and alchemy, at which, of course, the heroine was the best ever, even though her teacher hated her and tried to obstruct her from learning.
Which makes it sounds as though I didn't enjoy the book. Quite the opposite! I will 100% be there will bells on when the rest of this series comes out. It's the genre of my teen years, and I'm enjoying it immensely.
My Wife: You read that really fast. Was it good?
Me: I mean, no, but it was terribly earnest in a way that I found incredibly calming.
That's probably a little unfair. It wasn't bad; it was just absolutely unconcerned with anything other than the author's wish-fulfilment progression fantasy novel. As long as you're happy to be along on that ride, it's pretty great!
Our heroine is from an Indigenous group living on Nantucket Island in the 1840s (more on this in a sec), when she finds a dragon egg! This is very exciting, because her people used to have dragons, but don't anymore due to smallpox (?). The dragon hatches, imprints on her, and then since her people don't have dragons anymore, she has to go to dragon school in... Boston (Maybe? I'm a bit fuzzy on east coast geography, and the cities all had different names, which point I'll come back to in a minute.) The heroine then proceeds to find out that everything about mainstream American culture in the 19th century pretty well sucks, points this out repeatedly, is always right, and basically never suffers any significant negative consequences for her actions. Also, she gets to dress up in pretty dresses with corsets and hoop skirts (I'm going to talk about worldbuilding, I promise), because her roommate is rich, and likes dressing her up. So we get our clothes porn and can eat it too. And she simultaneously courts the hottest boy and the hottest girl. I'm not sure if the author is old enough to have seen Titanic, but if she did, her favourite scene was definetely the bit where Rose goes below decks and realises that the poor people are having way more fun.
It reminded me a little bit of Arrows of the Queen or something similar, except Mercedes Lackey usually included a plot in her novels, and her heroines were occasionally known to have flaws.
(And, for the record, I do think that Wampanoag culture, even after the apocalyptic plague, probably had its shit together generally more than the Victorians, but neither a culture nor a heroine that has zero flaws or internal conflicts feels terribly grounded in reality.)
Speaking of grounded in reality! I loved that the book said in Naomi Novik's generally direction, "Okay, but adding great fucking domesticated dragons to European history would have made things fall out differently some time before the Napoleonic Wars! Also, if Britain doesn't have its colonies, it's maybe not an empire?" So in this world, the Vikings won the "how do we domesticate dragons?" race, and were one of the dominant European cultures, and colonised North America (now called something else) north of the Chesapeake, while the Spanish, who seem to be a lot more mixed with North Africans(?), colonised south of there. The smallpox thing still happened, leaving Indigenous communities reeling, but the European colonies haven't really spread past the Appalachians by this point. A lot of words in use different roots because "Anglish" is more Norse, Arabic scientists have gotten around, and very little Latin is used in any of the science. Most people still follow the Norse gods. It's on the whole a really nice mix of familiar and how things could have gone differently.
Except. Why is it 1843? Why, when Christianity doesn't seem to have taken off, are we using the Christian calendar? Why are there hoop skirts? Why are there dance cards and waltzes? If the culture is based on the Vikings, why are gender rolls and social mores exactly the same as they were in the English-extracted, French-influenced Christian Americas? I guess there's only so many things the author wanted to change while still leaving us with points of recognition, but it did feel like she could've gone a little bit further on the social stuff. She was happily taking potshots at how Victorian morality was fucked up (fair!), while not explaining why said morality even existed in this world.
I did like how the dragon stuff worked. The author clearly put a lot of thought into the science, and the ways different cultures might approach that. The dragons are a lot more like Pern, not quite sentient but also empathically bonded to their riders, than Temeraire, where they're people. No word on dragonflight-related fucking yet, though. I liked all the magical worldbuilding around dragon breath and alchemy, at which, of course, the heroine was the best ever, even though her teacher hated her and tried to obstruct her from learning.
Which makes it sounds as though I didn't enjoy the book. Quite the opposite! I will 100% be there will bells on when the rest of this series comes out. It's the genre of my teen years, and I'm enjoying it immensely.