A review by naturalistnatalie
Voyage of the Basilisk by Marie Brennan

4.0

I'm still enjoying this series and I find each of the books provokes a similar response from me. This book reminds me a lot of Charles Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. Isabella is off to tropical areas in the hopes of getting some good research material on dragons. She just wants to figure out how all the different forms are related. With all her traveling, she has to try very hard to avoid breaking cultural mores. Her most difficult time was on Keonga where she had to pretend her son wasn't hers so she would be treated as a man instead of a woman (after dressing and acting like a man). She even had to marry a native woman so the spirits would be pacified.

Scirling so feels like Victorian England, down to the scandal sheets and trying to retain "proper" relationships with the men on the ship. The author even made the chapter titles feel like a 19th memoir. Because it felt like 19th century England, I get annoyed with the change of place names. I'm constantly trying to map Brennan's place names onto our world. (For example, I consider Scirling to be England, and the Broken Sea is Oceania.) Since the world of this book isn't exactly like our real world, then give me a map so I can place all these countries and stop trying to map them onto our world.