“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.”

I finally started this series! I put book one on my TBR back when it was first published and then never got around to it, not even after I met the author at a book festival and got a signed copy of book three (I did not yet own books one or two, but it was the only one available for signing). Maybe I would have gotten to it sooner if I would have realized one of my favorite audiobook narrators, Kate Reading, does the audio.

So this is a book that is written as if the main character, Lady Trent, has actually written her own memoirs. This is the first volume of those memoirs, which tells about the first part of her life, and how she became a famous naturalist, specifically one who studies dragons, and who made a bunch of scientific discoveries about them. The book, by the way, takes place on an alternate Earth, where among other differences (no England, for example), dragons are as commonplace as lions or tigers, but not very much is known about them.

It was satisfying to see Lady Trent bucking against the sexist conventions of her time. At first she does it more passively, but after she marries and has a bit more freedom (because her husband is also a science nerd) she actively takes the reins of her own professional life.

I’m interested to see where this goes. Presumably we are only going to see the significant events of her life, and her most significant expeditions. I’m particularly interested to see how the book deals with the issues of colonialism, as those were only brought up on the margins in this book, because they were going to a place that wasn’t colonized.