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 […]

Victorian Study of Dragons

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A Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan is what happens when you take a curious minded scientific woman in a time when women weren’t supposed to be scientific or curious, like Marie Curie for example, and drop her in a world where dragons exist. It’s awesome. Set in a faux Victorian England this is the autobiography of the world famous dragon expert Lady Isabella Trent, or it’s the first part of her autobiography. I loved every second of this book. One of the things […]

Too much dry travel writing, not enough DRAGONS for my taste

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3.5 stars Purported to be the first of Lady Isabella Trent’s journals, chronicling her life-long exploration of the world and its dragons, this book is a historical novel set in an alternate universe, where dragons obviously exist. I’m unsure of whether the time period in these books would be the Regency or more like Victorian times in our history, but the fictional country that our protagonist, Lady Isabella is from, is clearly modelled on historical England. We follow our heroine from childhood, where we learn […]



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