4/5 stars!

I'm really enjoying this series, and this book is my favorite so far! A witty female naturalist? Dragons? Adventures at sea? Huge fan of all of it. I'm so pleased there are two more books after this one!

Isabella is exactly the kind of protagonist I've come to appreciate as I've aged out of the young adult audience (not to say that I don't read and enjoy YA, just that I sometimes like to read about characters my own age). Although she's in her late twenties, I count Isabella as symbolically middle-aged by virtue of her status as a widow during an analog Victorian time period. That, combined with the fact that the series is narrated an older version of Isabella, forms a story of a woman whose whole life is dedicated to adventure at a time when that wasn't common. I appreciate stories in which a woman's life doesn't stop dead when she marries and has children. (I also enjoyed Isabella noting that motherhood hadn't come naturally to her.)

I have many more positive things to say about this book and the series as a whole—well-developed setting, constant character growth, examination of European-esque colonialism and western gender roles—but I'd much rather move on to my next book so I can get to In the Labyrinth of Drakes that much sooner!

(Side note: I switched between the audiobook and the hardcover for this read, and I loved the audiobook narrator!)