Review: Temeraire

Temeraire by Naomi Novik
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Books with dragons in will always capture my attention, and for a long time I’ve been curious about Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series. After enjoying her standalone Spinning Silver, I decided it was finally time to dive into Temeraire to see if I would enjoy it as much.

If I’m being completely honest, my feelings about this one are rather mixed. I feel my experience of the book was all over the place, rather than being the clear-cut enjoyment I had hoped for. In fact, I experienced such a wide range of feelings towards this book that I was unsure how to rate it.

At the start of the book, I was mildly intrigued. I was not sucked into the book in the way I had hoped, I was not desperately turning the pages to see how things played out, but I was curious. It was interesting enough to leave me turning the pages, enough to leave me wanting more, even if I was not obsessed.

A bit later, I found I was enjoy the book more. It started as a three-star rating, but details started to come to light that moved the book much closer to a four-star rating. I really enjoyed the way history and fantasy merged, I loved the details we were given, and I found myself more willing to read.

Towards the end, my feelings flipped. If I’m being brutally honest, there were points in the later part of the book where it dropped to a two-star rating. I continued reading as I wanted to see how things played out, but there was nothing making the book an addiction.

I think my issue is that I never came to care much about our main character. Our dragon was fun, but his human was a bit of a bore. There was nothing about him that appealed to me – in fact, I would go so far as to label him as dull. I also feel as though there wasn’t as much action as there could have been. There was a lot of information, which I loved, but I feel it came at the expense of the big scenes I’m accustomed to in fantasy books.

I’m certainly curious to see what comes in book two, but I wasn’t as crazy about this one as I had hoped to be.

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