“A Victory of Eagles” by Naomi Novik

This is the fifth book in the Temeraire series! You can find posts on the earlier posts here as well, there’s the first, second, third, and fourth! This is the first book to head back to England and honestly it is probably my favorite of the series so far. It was so nice to head back to familiar territory and see how the war is going. This book also does something different in that the narration now alternates between Temeraire and Laurence instead of just being from Laurence’s perspective.

The book starts with Temeraire in the breeding grounds with other dragons and being bored out of his mind. Laurence is meanwhile on a ship in forced servitude more or less, punishment for bringing a cure to the French and essentially committing treason at the end of the last book. Temeraire gets news that his ship sank with him on it, and starts rallying the dragons up there to go fight. They form their own regiment and head out to fight the French. Laurence meanwhile did survive, and was told that times are desperate enough that he has to find Temeraire and report for duty. They eventually catch up to the dragons and Temeraire insists on being treated as a leader in the army and getting pay for his dragons.

Napoleon tragically takes London, and Iskierka (a fire breathing dragon who hatches a book ago) ends up leaving the group and getting herself and her captain captured. Laurence and Tharkey head after her and Laurence runs into the woman he was supposed to marry if he didn’t go into the Aerial Corps and her husband. The husband accompanies them on the rescue mission and gets himself killed. They head off and the army leadership end up using Laurence’s status as a criminal to have him use the dragons to massacre French raiding parties. Tharkey eventually catches up with him and snaps him out of his despair that just led him to agree to this, and they have a huge battle with the French forces. The English are successful and drive them off the island, but Napoleon gets away and the white Celestial Lien blows apart most of the Navy.

During the calm afterwards, Laurence is sent off to a remote island to do a colonialism with Temeraire as his punishment. Iskierka ends up following them so Granby comes along too, and Tharkey agrees as an adventurer. On the way over, Laurence assures Temeraire that he is quite happy with how things turned out.

So a continual conversation going through the books is Temeraire’s insistence on the humanity and rights of the dragons. He has the most progress here in that now the dragons can hold positions of leadership in the military and they start to build infrastructure that can accommodate dragons. We also see Laurence advocate for them more. Temeraire also has an increased understanding of human politics as he realizes just how badly the treason hurt Laurence’s relationships and material prospects. By far though the best part of this is seeing how Temeraire is able to organize the dragons at the breeding grounds and get them to participate in the war and fight for themselves instead of sitting by passively. This leads to a lot of progress for the British in fact, and the dragons seem keen to carry this forward.

What is also fun is to see how on Laurence’s side his treason has impacted his relationships with the other dragon handlers. We don’t see as much of this, but he talks to Jane about how he could have done this more covertly, and he runs into his old girlfriend in London who thinks he’s a traitor. Harcourt just had her baby and doesn’t seem too with it, but she even seems worried about him. They for sure don’t disagree with what he did, but they appear to be very locked into their roles and can’t do much about that. The dragons in a sense are much more free than they are.

I do think one of the shortcomings of this book though was that the switching between narration took away a lot of the transitions and travel time. There were multiple points where I was confused what was happening because something was glossed over or missed in the transition. It is nice to hear from Temeraire, especially with the dragon liberation plot, but that doesn’t mean that we need to get sloppy with it.

All that to say that I don’t think I’m going to like this next book very much. The previous traveling books were fine but they didn’t have a firm base with familiar characters and setting, and we just cut down on the vast majority of the characters that I loved seeing again in the past two books. I am going to read it anyways and it’ll be interesting to see how Norvik pulls this off, but I suspect that my peak interest in the series just passed. This will be a tough installment to follow.