I'm reading the Memoirs of Lady Trent
Jul. 13th, 2019 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyDragon Naturalist.
Interesting setting there - it's basically Victorian England but all the country and language names are different, as are the months, and I think everybody's Jewish. Or, more accurately, a great many characters from her home country have names out of the Old Testament (including, notably, the eventual queen Miriam) and whenever we get a detail of their religion and how it interacts with culture or diet I think we're supposed to think "Jewish" instead of "Christian" or "Ancient Rome" or whatever. (Very specifically, they don't eat pork and she's much more revolted by accidentally eating pork than by eating insects for months on end. Also, the author specifically states that she sits shiva to mourn a death, which would seem to be a telling quote. However, our main characters are none of them terribly religious, so we don't get much in the way of specific details, and actual scriptures cited bear only a passing resemblance to real world ones... that, or my knowledge of the Bible is even scantier than I thought.)
Also, their mysterious ancient civilization (think "Egypt") was worldwide, while the Ancient Egyptians mostly stayed in Egypt. It's not clear how much their map resembles our map, but this mysterious ancient civilization has outposts in the equivalent of the Americas, in Asia, in Oceania, in Africa, in the Middle East, and throughout Europe. (Question to be left for the reader: did they have the equivalent of Columbus, or did Old and New World analogs always know about each other after the fall of this mysterious ancient civilization?) And it's left quite an impact on folklore and religion, though nobody really knows who the heck these people were or why they fell so rapidly.
These books have some very slow-moving plots, as you might expect from travel memoirs. International politics do eventually catch up with her in every last one, but they take their sweet time, and her dramatic discoveries are more likely to be "Dear God, I've pissed everybody off in this strange foreign village by being totally incompetent and unbearably rude!" than "My goodness, here is this amazing dragon!" - though she does discover something about dragons AND about the mysterious ancient civilization in each and every book. (And usually something about modern geopolitics, though she does seem to try very hard not to.)
Indeed, even after she discovers in book 5 what has become increasingly obvious to the reader, that the ancient civilization did not merely worship dragon-headed gods but was actually composed of dragon-headed people, and they still exist (obviously, or what the hell was the point of building up to this?), she spends the next month or so... tending their yaks.
It's all "AAAH! I'm surrounded by actual dragon-headed people!" for a few minutes and then "Tend the yaks, get some vocabulary, tend the yaks, wonder how they trained their yak-herding dragons, hide from the other dragon-headed people who are visiting the village, make a conclusion about their draconic society, tend the yaks."
I enjoyed this series quite a bit, which is why I'm nearly at the end. If you don't enjoy slow-moving books written roughly in the style of a Victorian travel memoir, though, don't waste your time.
Interesting setting there - it's basically Victorian England but all the country and language names are different, as are the months, and I think everybody's Jewish. Or, more accurately, a great many characters from her home country have names out of the Old Testament (including, notably, the eventual queen Miriam) and whenever we get a detail of their religion and how it interacts with culture or diet I think we're supposed to think "Jewish" instead of "Christian" or "Ancient Rome" or whatever. (Very specifically, they don't eat pork and she's much more revolted by accidentally eating pork than by eating insects for months on end. Also, the author specifically states that she sits shiva to mourn a death, which would seem to be a telling quote. However, our main characters are none of them terribly religious, so we don't get much in the way of specific details, and actual scriptures cited bear only a passing resemblance to real world ones... that, or my knowledge of the Bible is even scantier than I thought.)
Also, their mysterious ancient civilization (think "Egypt") was worldwide, while the Ancient Egyptians mostly stayed in Egypt. It's not clear how much their map resembles our map, but this mysterious ancient civilization has outposts in the equivalent of the Americas, in Asia, in Oceania, in Africa, in the Middle East, and throughout Europe. (Question to be left for the reader: did they have the equivalent of Columbus, or did Old and New World analogs always know about each other after the fall of this mysterious ancient civilization?) And it's left quite an impact on folklore and religion, though nobody really knows who the heck these people were or why they fell so rapidly.
These books have some very slow-moving plots, as you might expect from travel memoirs. International politics do eventually catch up with her in every last one, but they take their sweet time, and her dramatic discoveries are more likely to be "Dear God, I've pissed everybody off in this strange foreign village by being totally incompetent and unbearably rude!" than "My goodness, here is this amazing dragon!" - though she does discover something about dragons AND about the mysterious ancient civilization in each and every book. (And usually something about modern geopolitics, though she does seem to try very hard not to.)
Indeed, even after she discovers in book 5 what has become increasingly obvious to the reader, that the ancient civilization did not merely worship dragon-headed gods but was actually composed of dragon-headed people, and they still exist (obviously, or what the hell was the point of building up to this?), she spends the next month or so... tending their yaks.
It's all "AAAH! I'm surrounded by actual dragon-headed people!" for a few minutes and then "Tend the yaks, get some vocabulary, tend the yaks, wonder how they trained their yak-herding dragons, hide from the other dragon-headed people who are visiting the village, make a conclusion about their draconic society, tend the yaks."
I enjoyed this series quite a bit, which is why I'm nearly at the end. If you don't enjoy slow-moving books written roughly in the style of a Victorian travel memoir, though, don't waste your time.
