[LISTENED TO: November 2021] A Natural History of Dragons
This book sounded interesting. I knew nothing about it (aside from the title) and had no idea it would unfold the way it did.
Turns out that Kate Reading, whom I didn’t know, was an outstanding reader. She did male voices so compellingly that I forgot it was just one reader.
The book is a memoir. The book feels like a Victorian novel (where a woman is not allowed to have the kind of adventures she ultimately does). Reading reads Lady Trent in a kind of slow, deliberate, older, upper class lady voice. It felt a wee bit slow at first, although I couldn’t imagine her doing it any other way.
Lady Isabella Tent is the leading scholar on dragons. Indeed, the book starts:
All the world, from Scirland to the farthest reaches of Eriga, know Isabella, Lady Trent, to be the world’s preeminent dragon naturalist. She is the remarkable woman who brought the study of dragons out of the misty shadows of myth into the clear light of modern science.
Each chapter even has an olde-fashioned style in which the chapter heading summarizes what’s to be found within. Lady Trent is an old woman now, finished with the excitement of her life and all that she has accomplished and she has decided that rather than answering all of the letters she gets all the time, that she would set the record straight and write her memoirs.
She starts from her early childhood and her tone is at one approving and occasionally disbelieving in the kind of person she was.
When Lady Trent was young Isabella, she had a unladylike desire to be scientific. When she first captured a “sparkling” (this book is written as if we would know what she’s talking about since it is a memoir of a famous person’s exploits. If you don’t know what a sparkling is, well, where have you been?).
Her mother was horrified by her behavior. I mean what kind of girl dissects a bird to see how it can fly? A scientific genius, that’s what kind. (more…)
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