Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“I had rather face wild beasts and diseases than the perils of civilization.”

Voyage of the Basilisk (The Memoirs of Lady Trent, #3) by Marie Brennan

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This series is a nerdy good time. And this book in particular really leaned into the scholarly nature of Lady Trent’s calling. The last book, a lot of page-time was taken up by Lady Trent and her companions navigating local and global politics while trying to learn about dragons, and while that is a factor here, too, Voyage of the Basilisk feels more balanced, with a focus more clearly on her science and what she got up to while doing it, and also on her personal relationships […]

Adventures in the swamp.

The Tropic of Serpents (The Memoirs of Lady Trent, #2) by Marie Brennan

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A great thing about these books is that because they all take place in different locations, I find it much easier to remember what happened in each book, and the actual movement of the plot even months later, not something that is common for me anymore. Aging is so fun. I’m glad because this is the last book I read in April and I’m only now getting around to reviewing this. This book follows Lady Trent’s first expedition as a scholar and a naturalist rather […]

“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.”

A Natural History of Dragons (The Memoirs of Lady Trent, #1) by Marie Brennan

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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 […]

I liked it, even though it could use more dragons

A Natural History of Dragons, A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan

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CBR BINGO: Monster, because there be dragons in here! BINGO: Rec’d, Monster, Verse, Bird, Time First of all, I love this image on the cover. The idea of a naturalist who studies dragons is appealing to me, as someone who a) enjoys naturalist memoirs and b) enjoys fantasy. The marriage of science and fantasy appeals to my nature, and I was very excited to read this book. And, I enjoyed it. But I didn’t love it as I hoped. A Natural History of Dragons is […]

Lady Trent takes another trip

The Tropic of Serpents by Marie Brennan

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The second book in The Memoirs of Lady Trent series, while The Tropic of Serpents didn’t quite reach the same giddy heights of adoration as A Natural History of Dragons had, that was mostly down to me having had no expectations with the first, and stratospheric ones with the second. The now widowed Isabella Trent is mother to a young son, but still possessing a naturalist’s thirst for more knowledge about dragons. Flying in the face of what polite Scirling society thinks she ought to […]

Fantastic start to what I’m sure will become my new obsession

A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan

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An absolute delight from start to finish, as a huge fan of both the diaries of Victorian explorers and fantasy, A Natural History of Dragons felt perfectly tailored for me and I adored it so much I’ve already gone ahead and bought a bunch more of the series. Lady Trent has always been fascinated by dragons, but in her day a lady’s place is most definitely meant to be sitting prettily in a drawing room, making sure to not tax her thoughts with anything more […]



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