Isabella’s early happiness is soon overshadowed by a miscarriage followed by depression, and in order to cheer up again, she once more takes up her dragon studies with great enthusiasm. Isabella comes across Jacob Camherst, one of the gentlemen on the list, in the king’s menagerie, pursues the acquaintance, and when Jacob asks for her hand, she accepts him gladly. When she is old enough to have a season in Falchester (London), her father surprises her by handing her a list of men whom he knows to have a copy of A Natural History of Dragons, the most comprehensive study on dragons at that time, in their libraries, and might be just open-minded enough to not mind a wife having scientific interests.
Isabella has been fascinated by dragons from her early youth, trying to conserve dragonfly-like small species, and tricking her father into ordering books about dragons for his library. The narrative proper starts with the heroine, Isabella Hendemore, growing up as the only daughter (among several boys) of a wealthy landowner in Scirland (the equivalent of Britain all places in the book bear imaginary names, but are – so far – based on real nations or cultures). The novel begins with the now old first-person narrator announcing that as an addendum to her scientific publications, which she assumes the reader to be familiar with, she proposes to tell the adventures that form the basis for the scientific discoveries that have made her famous. The author had me at this passage in the prologue: “Be warned, then: the collected volumes of this series will contain frozen mountains, foetid swamps, hostile foreigners, hostile fellow countrymen, the occasional hostile family member, bad decisions, misadventures in orienteering, diseases of an unromantic sort, and a plenitude of mud. So I jumped at the opportunity to review Marie Brennan’s A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent, the first installment in a series of fantasy novels set in an alternative 19th century.
I grew up with Anne MacCaffrey’s Pern books, and Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series of historical fantasies is among my favorites.
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