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A review by suzemo
Throne of Jade by Naomi Novik
3.0
In which our intrepid dragon and his pal are sent off to China.
We've identified how and where Temeraire's egg came from and the Chinese are (apparently) pissed about it. So we journey back and we learn about how China incorporates their dragons into their national story, which was actually pretty cool.
I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as the first and it felt much more YA to me. I think it's because the character of everyone in the story was being telegraphed. There's a kind of mystery going on, but you could figure it out pretty damned early on. Certain plot points had to be shown before the motivation behind the characters became abundantly clear, but overall, you knew exactly which characters to trust and who not to trust and pretty much what everyone was up to. A little too one-note for my tastes. Subtlety was utterly lacking. And you could totally guess how this was going to end well ahead of time, which I also didn't appreciate.
There was a pretty heavy handed Lesson (tm) to be learned and moral/s of the story were dropped on the reader's head with a large anvil.
I'm still going to continue with the series, and I'm hoping that once they get back to Britain things will get more interesting again.
Apropos of very little, I have a cross stitch piece in progress called Celestial Dragon, and the entire time I'm reading this book, I just want to work on it at the same time. It's one of the times that I really wish I were listening to the audio instead of reading it.
We've identified how and where Temeraire's egg came from and the Chinese are (apparently) pissed about it. So we journey back and we learn about how China incorporates their dragons into their national story, which was actually pretty cool.
I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as the first and it felt much more YA to me. I think it's because the character of everyone in the story was being telegraphed. There's a kind of mystery going on, but you could figure it out pretty damned early on. Certain plot points had to be shown before the motivation behind the characters became abundantly clear, but overall, you knew exactly which characters to trust and who not to trust and pretty much what everyone was up to. A little too one-note for my tastes. Subtlety was utterly lacking. And you could totally guess how this was going to end well ahead of time, which I also didn't appreciate.
There was a pretty heavy handed Lesson (tm) to be learned and moral/s of the story were dropped on the reader's head with a large anvil.
I'm still going to continue with the series, and I'm hoping that once they get back to Britain things will get more interesting again.
Apropos of very little, I have a cross stitch piece in progress called Celestial Dragon, and the entire time I'm reading this book, I just want to work on it at the same time. It's one of the times that I really wish I were listening to the audio instead of reading it.