Voyage of the Basilisk

Pros: excellent world-building, fun protagonist, quick read

Cons: ending felt rushed

This is the third volume of Isabella, Lady Trent's memoirs and deals with the 2 year research voyage she took on the RSS Basilik. With her she brings Tom, who accompanied her on previous journeys, her nine year old son, Jake, and his governess, Abby.

As with the other books in this series, this is a character driven fantasy novel, following the extraordinary adventures of a female dragon researcher from Scirland. While the previous books focused on one area for her excursions, this one covers several locations where she researches various types of dragons in an effort to create a proper taxonomy for the species.

I love the degree of detail Brennan adds to these book, particularly the background tidbits that don't strictly need to be there but show the amount of behind the scenes thought that goes into the stories. For example, it doesn't really matter to the story that this trip took 2 years or more to plan (besides aging the characters), but it acknowledges that such travel in the past was not only expensive but also difficult to arrange. I also appreciated the occasional bureaucratic, medical, and cultural problems they encountered.

The world expands greatly as the ship stops at numerous ports, sometimes leaving Isabella's group behind for a month or more to do research, sometimes carrying on immediately to the next location. Once again the world-building is excellent. It's possible at times to see what real world cultures she's adapting for her book, but each society is very different from the others and there's a wide variety of characters and customs that show up.

I'm not generally a fan of character driven fantasy but Isabella is such an interesting person that I race through these volumes. Part way through this book they encounter another researcher, who helps them out. Suhail was just as fun and interesting as Isabella, and I have my suspicions about his hidden last name.

While it's possible to read this volume on its own, there are several allusions to the events of the previous books, and a few spoilerish conversations.

The ending feels a little rushed. There's a climactic event, after which events are narrated rather quickly through the denouement. It works for the structure of a novel but would be somewhat unusual for the memoir this purports to be.

These are lighthearted books that don't take long to read and are accompanied by gorgeous illustrations by Todd Lockwood. It's a series I highly recommend.

I give up. This series is deteriorating very fast and I can't be arsed to go on. This is a year when I just don't have the energy and time to go on with things like this, so I have quite a few DNF books and I think it's fine.

My issue with the series is the protagonist. As much as she was fine in the first book, she is becoming more and more of a person I can't stand.
Isabella is spoilt. Of course now people will say nope, she isn't, she goes out to the jungles and oceans and mountains to study dragons, without any luxuries. But what I am talking about is responsibilities. She keeps talking about how hard life is for a woman. How she is limited in everything, how it's such a sad life, but we see nothing of that. What, as a kid she was told to not do certain things? She still did them and nothing happened. As an adult she is even worse, she just has no regard for anyone other than herself and what is the most convenient for her obsession.
Which is fine. But Isabella is portrayed as this wonderful woman who is such a heroine and all. Nope. She is a womanchild who cries about things not being how she wants them when they are.

The son character... I have no idea why he is there, other than for Isabella to be spiteful about someone she produced not being like her and annoying her with being a boy who supposedly could do whaaaatever he wanted, so he does that, does whatever he likes and not what his mother does. Jacob is more of a mildly annoying roommate than her child.

I don't care about fantasy place names and tribe names being repeated over and over again while we get nowhere. It's ridiculous. I want to hear more about dragons, to elaborate more on the damn creatures on the cover of the books, not tribal issues and every man being interested in Isabella, while she is just doing whatever.

I'm quitting this series. Bye.

3.5 stars