The Dragons of the Court of China

Book Review

Throne of Jade

Naomi Novik

The second book of the Temeraire series tells the story of Laurence and Temeraire's journey to China. It seemed that China was unhappy with the fact that the egg of a Celestial had fallen to Britain's hands ('His Majesty's Dragon', book 1 of the Temeraire series), and due to some political maneuvering by Britain and China, they were both forced to go on a voayge to China, a voyage full of intrigues and life-threatening dangers.

While in the first book Novik set down the concept of applying naval battles to aerial combats on top of dragons and how their everyday lives are integrated with the lives of humans in Britain, now Novik sets her sight on a different setting: China. She goes on to describe how dragons and their lives are integrated with the lives of ordinary humans in China.

The bulk of the book, however, still lies more on the journey from Britain to China. And another aspect of dragon combat is now described: dragon carriers. The dragon carrier ships borrow heavily from old and modern naval ships, a ship with masts but with an addition of a dragon deck on the bow of the ship. Rather different in build from modern carriers, with their runways for fighter jets, but similar in the purpose of carrying air units which in this care are dragons.

Aside from the new settings, the story itself begins with a lot of actions in the first parts of the story. However, unlike the first book, which focuses heavily on dragon combats, this book focuses more on twists and political agendas. And this is apparent in the middle and end parts of the book. I feel that there are a lot of characters left underdeveloped by the end of the book, and there are some loose ends that haven't been fully explained. Knowing that this is a series, however, I expect that there would be opportunities in tying these up and more plot developments in the coming books.

From the writing point of view, I must say that one of the things that sort of nagged me is the fact that at times, Novik did not completely flesh out conversations between 2 characters. There are many instances where she left it to the readers to figure out/imagine what has been said between 2 characters, and just provided the end result of the conversation (e.g, a character walking away in anger). I am not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing (maybe the conversations are too mundane to be described in details), but it's just one of the more prominent things I picked up during the reading of this book.

Despite the feeling of wanting more at the end of the book, the story it tells is another worthy addition to the Temeraire series. Let us hope that the subsequent book develops more of the characters found in the second and continues the great storyline the series has manage to build up until this second book.