spaceponies

Brightly writ­ten, started off with ter­rific pace. Strong nar­ra­tive voice, strong tone that made the Napoleonic era feel real. Won­der­ful atten­tion to detail in the set­ting. Then sud­denly down­shifted into what I can only call the getting-ready-for-a-long-series pace. The end­ing was a com­plete surprise–not the con­tent, but: “Oh. Oh! So that must have been the end­ing. This trail­ing mat­ter is an appen­dix of some sort.”

This will prob­a­bly read bet­ter as part of an anthol­ogy, but this first vol­ume wasn’t a com­plete story. A lot of spun plot threads and side char­ac­ters intro­duced, but only the small­est sub­threads resolved. Hey, check out the excit­ing next chap­ter! Noth­ing wrong with that, but the book as inde­pen­dent entity suf­fers con­sid­er­ably for it.

I enjoyed the page by page read­ing, even the book-as-part-of-a-series, but I’m not on board for an open-ended series just now. Novik's up to six and count­ing. A lit­tle quick research on Wikipedia says that she plans to stop at nine. I’ll cir­cle back in ten years and see how that worked out.

Ama­zon link: His Majesty's Dragon