We meet Captain Will Laurence and see that he is honourable, intelligent and battle-wise, with a crew prepared to fight for their Captain and Country. Whilst Temeraire is listed for a general audience and has broad appeal to adults, it is also suitable, engaging and appealing to young adults and adolescents.īefore the first page has turned, the reader is drawn into the early 1800s, on a British Royal Navy Ship, mid-way through a battle. This novel was highly recommended to me by a wonderful teacher-librarian, who knew I was seeking a novel with depth, intrigue and dragons, and immediately retrieved this novel for me from her Young Adult shelves. The dragon Temeraire was meant for the Emperor Napoleon himself and promises to grow into no ordinary creature.Temeraire, (also published as His Majesty’s Dragon in the US) is the But, more astonishing than the dragonet - named Temeraire by Laurence - are the documents found with him, documents addressed to Napoleon from the greatest, most skilled dragon-breeders in the world - the Chinese. Laurence must now join them duty demands it, though his heart is broken. The life of an aviator is not a desirable one reviled by fashionable society, they live hard, lonely lives bound to duty and they frequently die young. The person chosen to first harness the beast must be an aviator, for the dragon will accept no other captain. Hatchling dragons must be put in a harness immediately otherwise the dragon-young become hard to control - fit only for the breeding colonies. A sinewy new-born emerges from the fragmented shell, ignores his harness-bearer, approaches Laurence and changes his life. Having spent months on a slow journey from Asia, the egg hatches. On board Laurence finds a dragon egg - a great prize as England is in sore need. His career is born from a love for the sea and he takes his duty very seriously Months before the battle of Trafalgar, on patrol in the Atlantic, The Reliant takes a small French frigate, storm-damaged and possessing a fierce crew unwilling to surrender as easily as they should. Captain Laurence is a satisfied man with a respectable commission aboard the ship Reliant. Raining fire and acid upon their enemies, they engage in a swift, violent combat with flying tooth and claw. Squadrons of aviators swarm the skies - a deadly shield for the cumbersome canon-firing vessels. As Napoleon's tenacious infantry rampages across Europe and his armada lies in wait for Nelson's smaller fleet, the war does not rage on land and water alone.
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