Blood of Tyrants: Book Eight of Temeraire

I cannot remember a series of ANY that has me wholeheartedly entrenched....Temeraire & Laurence are two beautiful beings navigating the world with more heart and loyalty than any characters I've known. The historical re-imagining is so unique and wonderful to the mind...truly AMAZING. Add in the dragons and their many personalities is just WHIMSICAL PERFECTION! I will be waiting with anticipation for the final Temeraire story and I am keeping these on a shelf close by to be re-read many times over I am sure. Thank you Naomi Novik for sharing your incredible imagination with the world. If you are reading this to see if this is a book series you would like...RUN DON'T WALK TO your nearest bookseller in the real world or online and purchase it TODAY! You don't have to be a sci-fi or historical-fiction buff to enjoy...trust me!!

Very rarely do I write reviews, but in this instance I felt compelled to do so.I cannot recall loving a book series this much (or reading an entire series!) since the Nancy Drew series of the ‘80’s!!This is Vol. 8 of the 9 Vol. series and it happens to be my least favorite installment. Laurence becomes lost and suffers from amnesia, but I had hoped for him to regain his memory much sooner. Even when Laurence & Temeraire came back together, the amnesia was still prevalent…meaning they still weren’t quite up to their usual selves. I found myself missing the special bond between Temeraire & Laurence and the interaction between them. It was for that reason alone that I gave it 4 stars. I still LOVE the book & highly recommend it. Temeraire, beloved dragon that he is, will quickly find his way into your heart & mind.

The latest installment of Naomi Novik's Temeraire series does exactly what such a volume should: it takes us from the surprising developments of the previous book and carries us through to another crucial cliffhanger with no small measure of adventure, humor, and more fascinating glimpse's of the author's world along the way.It is now the year 1812, and that fact alone should give some hint as to where the action will take us. The first two-thirds of the novel, however, concern the ways and means Captain William Laurence and his dragon Temeraire eventually come to face a certain Corsican in a certain large, cold, winter-ravaged country. The first obstacle to be overcome, however, is the Laurence's shipwreck-induced amnesia that leaves him lost and alone in Japan with the past 8 years of his memory gone. Amnesia is such a tired cliche, a tool of soap opera writers who have run out of ideas, that I found Novik's resort to it initially disappointing. However, it actually may prove a handy device for a reader new to the series to slowly glean details of what has gone before along with Laurence.As always, my favorite parts are those that describe the social and political systems in the various nations and how the existence of sentient dragons and their integration into human society has resulted in differences great and small from the world and history we know. While Britain is no different from the country Jane Austen knew and Russia treats its dragons about as humanely as its human serfs, dragons in China and Japan rule estates and command armies. We get hints in this episode that things may be similar in North America, and as the only inhabited continent as yet unvisited by our protagonists we may see more of the US in the future.After a few slow and uneven early chapters, Blood of Tyrants eventually and inevitably captured and captivated my imagination like its predecessors and I am eagerly awaiting the next installment.

Naomi Novik keeps the franchise, story arc, and characters fresh, compelling, and strong in the penultimate book of the Temeraire series. There are few worlds I want to dip into as much as her imagining of a world with dragons, and none I would rather visit, only others I hold as dear as hers.

I discovered this series about an month ago and have enjoyed almost all of the experience. So, I was really looking forward to this 'penultimate' book. But, half way through I was ready to put the book down in disgust. Actually 'put the book down' is a bit of an understatement. I was ready to mulch it in the garbage disposal, drop it out the window and bury it under a thick layer of concrete.Any author who announces the intention of using amnesia as plot device should be confined to quarters, have their coffee ration cut in half and be forced to write user manuals for kitchen appliances until such time as they return to their senses. What a dreadful first two hundred pages. Paper thin characters marching through one cardboard cutout contrivance after another. The reader has to spend page after page as Laurence relearns all the things he'd spent the whole series learning. The reader has to yet again watch as Novik leads her hero through a paint-by-the-numbers recap of every great concept she penned in the first few books. In so doing, she makes an awful hash of the wonderful societies and concepts she'd brought to life in previous efforts.Novik commits the worst kind of treason against her characters in the first half of this book. Temeraire is dopey, emotional, short sighted and greedy. It is as though Celestials hatch from the egg wise and then within a few short years turn into whiny children. Laurence stumbles stiffly through the story stepping in every mud puddle along the way. Of course this is attributed to his head injury but is really just the result of sloppy, wrong-headed writing.And that is where I'd resolved to end my review, but I choked back the bile that threatened to overwhelm me half way through and was pleasantly surprised by a good second half. The last half of the book is more alive than Novik's last two novels put together. Maybe she brought on a good ghost writer or dropped the ghost writer who penned the first half of this book into an icy river somewhere. It certainly doesn't read as though it were written by a single person. Whatever the cause, fans can expect to finish the book feeling only half as angry as they felt on page two hundred. And, yes, I suppose I will buy the final book whenever that emerges. I can only hope that Novik will never again prostrate herself before whatever imp in muse's robes she consulted when penning the first half of this book.

Excellent item, speedy delivery

Conforme à mes attentes.

I tend to like "alternative history" fantasy novels (Harry Turledove, etc.) and this entire series is one of the best. The history and characters are realistic and believable even in the fantasy timeline. The way the characters progress through the series keeps it interesting and the progress of the plot throughout the books matching the Napoleonic Wars is very well done. It was however time to wrap up the series because after so many books it was getting to be a tad repetitive in the plot with each book.

El libro está fatal encuadernado, con las hojas cortadas irregularmente. Lo cambié por defectuoso, y el nuevo vino igual. Inaceptable, especialmente a estos precios. Y para mas inri, lo podía haber sacado mucho, mucho, mucho más barato en Amazon.uk o en USA. Evidentemente, para libros en inglés comprar en Amazon.es es hacer el pardillo. NEVER AGAIN

Ich habe mir die kindle-Edition des Del-Ray-Verlages bestellt und bin von dem Buch begeistert. Nachdem Novic ihre beiden Helden zuletzt doch mehr passiv ein Teil des Geschehens hat sein lassen, greifen Temeraire und Laurence nun wieder sehr aktiv ins Geschehen ein. Der Gedächtnisverlust des menschlichen Hauptcharakters hat den schönen Nebeneffekt, dass Ereignisse vorheriger Bücher interessant aufbereitet werden. Ich muss gestehen, dass ich zwischenzeitlich großes Mitleid mit Laurence hatte, denn ein zweiten Schiffbruch innerhalb so kurzer Zeit zu erleiden, schien mir ein hartes Los. Doch die daraus resultierende Amnesie des Charakters bringt Eigenschaften an ihm wieder hervor, die ich zum Teil ein wenig vor lauter Bemühen, sich nach dem begangenen Hochverrat zu rehabilitieren, vermisst hatte. Laurence gewinnt einen guten Teil seiner alten Steifheit zurück. Die aktive Beteiligung von Laurence und Temeraire führt zu einer schnelleren Erzählweise, so wird die Spannung bis zum Schluss aufrechterhalten. Ich kann es nun kaum erwarten, dass der letzte Band erscheint.