An Essex village in 1940

The Oaken Heart, Margery Allingham

After I read Margery Allingham's Tether's End a few weeks ago, I went looking for a list of the Albert Campion books.  I found a bibliography on the Allingham Society's website, but in the middle of the list was a title I didn't recognize, The Oaken Heart.  The summary of it was so intriguing that I immediately put in a request to interlibrary loan.  In the first pages of her book, Allingham explained its purpose and how it came to be written in a letter to the residents of her village near the Essex coast:

"Last November an American whom some of you know [her published at Doubleday] asked me to put it down so that he and his wife and his village in America could gather exactly what life has been like down here for us ordinary country people during the war. It was a business request, and I have made an ultra-careful job of it, as you will see, because I believe that he and his friends are sufficiently (but by no means exactly) like us for it to be possible for me to convey to him much more of the actual truth than is usual on these occasions . . . Also, the war is getting very close to them over there . . . It is not a private attempt at propaganda, nor yet a disinterested gesture on my part. I have been employed as a professional writer by the American to tell him what he wants to know." 

The village where Allingham and her husband Philip Youngman Carter lived is Tolleshunt D'Arcy (renamed "Auburn" in the book).  She began the book by introducing her readers to the village, its geography and its residents.  The Carters' home was in the center of it, and though they had only moved into it in 1934, they seem to have quickly found their place, probably in part because Allingham had lived in Essex from childhood.  She took a sociologist's interest in the community, analyzing their state of mind and heart starting in late 1938, through the fraught events of 1939, and then into the first two years of the war.  She described the evolution of the community's thinking on the war and Britain's place in it:

"In those weeks in May and June [1940] I think ninety-nine per cent of English folk, country and town, found their souls . . . [in] the bald discovery that you would honestly and in cold blood rather die when it came to it than be bossed about by a Nazi . . . They said things like 'Looks like we'll have to stand up to 'em then,' . . . or merely and most firmly, 'We can't have they here, no, no.'"

The greatest upheaval at the start of the war was the unexpected arrival of five hundred mothers and their young children, evacuees from London, most of whom were not well-suited to country life.  Allingham took a leading role in managing their placement with village families; meanwhile her husband had become the head of the local air raid wardens, and their home the village headquarters.  Though her focus remained on the countryside, in the later part of the book Allingham wrote about two trips to London in the midst of the Blitz.  Despite the continual air raids on her part of Essex, the damage was limited, at least up to the time the book was published in 1941.

As one might expect in a book written for an American audience, Allingham spent some time analyzing both the differences and the similarities between the British and the Americans, like she was trying to explain each to the other.  In her telling, the people of Auburn initially thought it only natural that America might not rush to Britain's aid again, though self-interest and the ties between the two countries would eventually have their effect.

In addition to coping with the upheaval of the war, Allingham was on a deadline to complete a Campion novel, published in 1941 as Traitor's Purse and set in the early years of the war. 

"On my part, the completion of my thriller was a vital necessity; no question about that. My part in the family war effort was to keep the home going and pay the taxes, and there were times when I wished I had been prenticed to a different trade. My tale was about a man with amnesia and required a mental contortionist with uninterrupted leisure to write the blessed thing . . . I was always hoping that the end of one thriller would not overtake me before I finished the other."

As I read The Oaken Heart, I was mentally comparing it with Vera Brittain's England's Hour, also published in 1941 and also written for an American audience.  The books, though very different, complement each other.  Brittain's focus was urban: "to present, from several different angles, this wartime life as it has appeared to the ordinary London civilian day by day."  Perhaps in a natural reaction to the months of bombing that she endured, the devastation that she witnessed, Brittain's book feels more urgent, almost impatient at times.  Yet though she also analyzed actions and reactions, feelings and thoughts, it was from more of a distance than Allingham, embedded in the middle of her small rural community.  As I read I was also comparing The Oaken Heart with the war-time novels in Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire series and her fictional portrayal of the home front.  One of the major differences I noted is that Allingham's village seems to have had less class division or class consciousness than Thirkell's.  Most of the Auburn residents that Allingham described and quoted would have been minor characters in a Barsetshire novel.

The Allingham Society's site described The Oaken Heart as "one of the great books to come out of the Second World War," and though I'm not an expert on the literature of the war, I'd agree with that.

A missing ring and a banished heir

The Talisman Ring, Georgette Heyer

Just the other day the Georgette Heyer listserv that I belong to was discussing which is the best book for a new Heyer reader to start with.  This topic comes up frequently, in part I think because people want to share the joy that they find in her books, and they want the book they choose to make a good impression (and possibly a convert).  Among my own favorites, I recommend The Unknown Ajax, Venetia, and The Talisman Ring as perfect places to start, and the discussion reminded me that it's been too long since I've re-read them myself.

The Talisman Ring is one of Heyer's early works, published in 1937, and it is set in the Georgian period rather than the Regency.  It opens in the winter of 1793, as Sir Tristram Shield arrives at the home of his great-uncle Sylvester, Lord Lavenham, who is dying.   Sylvester has a granddaughter, Eustacie, an orphan whom he brought back from France just before the Revolution.  He also has a grandson, Ludovic, who fled the country amid accusations that he murdered a local man in a dispute over an heirloom, the ring of the title, which he pledged in gaming.  Sylvester wants to see Eustacie married before he dies, and he has chosen Tristram to be her husband.  He ruthlessly rejects another cousin, Basil Lavenham, the next heir after the absent Ludovic, because he is a beau "who wears a green coat and yellow pantaloons, and a damned absurd sugar-loaf on his head!"

Tristram and Eustacie both accept the match, only to realize quickly that they are not well-suited for each other.  A romantic young girl, who dreams of adventure, not marriage to an older country gentleman, Eustacie develops an interest in her outlaw cousin Ludovic.  When she decides to run away to London to be a governess, rather than marry Tristram, she falls in with a gang of free-traders, and almost more adventure than she could have hoped for.  A handsome young smuggler takes her with him as they try to evade the Excisemen.  He is shot, and they end up at a nearby inn, The Red Lion.  Staying there are Sarah Thane and her brother Sir Hugh.  Sarah is quickly drawn into their adventure, appointing herself Eustacie's chaperone and helping to fend off Excisemen and Bow Street Runners, not to mention the Beau, pursuing Eustacie and curious about the identity of her smuggler.  When Sir Tristram arrives in search of his lost fiancée, much against his will he finds himself embroiled as well, protecting the young smuggler and searching for the lost talisman ring, the discovery of which could prove Ludovic's innocence.

He also finds himself drawn to Sarah, one of Heyer's most delightful heroines.  Not a young chit but a woman of twenty-eight, she has kept house for Sir Hugh when not jaunting around Europe with him.  She has wit and charm and a lovely sense of humor, and while Eustacie thinks her as romantic as herself, we know that Sarah also has a foundation of solid commonsense, which stands her in good stead in coping with the adventures she finds herself in.  Her brother Hugh is one of Heyer's great minor characters, a large man who reminds me of The Unknown Ajax's Hugo, though he is far more indolent.  A Justice of the Peace, he has strong views on smuggling, as strong as his taste for the brandy and other untaxed liquors in the Red Lion's cellars.  He ambles through the story, never quite sure what is going on but adding greatly to the fun of one of Heyer's best books.

A women's world

Califia's Daughters, Leigh Richards

I'm not interested in dystopian fiction.  I think there is enough present suffering and tragedy in the world without reading about what the next generations might have to endure.  But I make an exception for Califia's Daughters, because the author Leigh Richards is really Laurie R. King, and I will read and re-read anything and everything she writes (even Touchstone, one of these days).  When the LRK virtual book club over on Goodreads chose it for discussion this month, I decided it was time to read it again, though I have yet to join the discussions.

The story opens with a rush, with two wagons and outriders approaching an isolated valley somewhere south of San Francisco.  The Valley's security forces are keeping the travellers under close surveillance. Meanwhile Judith, her grandmother Kirsten and her sister Dian, leaders of the community of 285 people, have sent the oldest and the youngest to safety in the nearby caves.  Among those hidden away are the Valley's 27 males.  We are not told precisely what has happened to this world, but in the time Before, there were armed uprisings, riots, violence aimed at those perceived as privileged, including attacks on universities and other centers of learning.  In one such attack, the bombing of a research facility released deadly chemicals and biological agents into the air.  One strain of chemical attack has infected human males, decimating the world's men while leaving women unaffected.  There is currently one male to every ten or twelve females. Male infants and small children are especially vulnerable; many do not survive their first year.

When the wagons finally arrive at the entrance to the Valley, far from a threat they bring people seeking asylum.  They have travelled a long way from their home in the Oregon Territories. A violent and ruthless ruler, Queen Bess, with her headquarters in Portland, is pushing the borders of her regime further and further south, threatening their village.  They want to join forces with the Valley, behind the buffer of Meijing, once known as San Francisco and now under the benevolent if strict control of the Chinese community.  Before the Valley community can accept these newcomers, though, they agree among themselves to send Dian north on a secret reconnaissance mission, to make sure the supplicants aren't a Trojan horse, that they aren't hiding anything that could threaten the Valley.

So Dian sets off on an epic journey that will take her to Meijing and then beyond its safe borders into the wilderness that Oregon [Oregon!] has become, and finally into the hellish city of Ashtown, which has traded freedom for security under a police-led regime.  Both in the Valley and on the road, we see the different ways that women had adapted to this new world, what they are making of it, what their daily lives are like, and the terrible choices that some make.  And it is a women's world.  The few males that survive to adolescence are closely guarded, precious assets to be preserved at all cost.  It is only a short step from there to treating men as possessions.  Laurie King has said that she wrote Califia's Daughters in part out of her strong negative reaction to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (you can read her thoughts here).

This book works on so many levels for me.  King builds a fascinating world, with characters that feel real and true, that I came to care about.  The Valley itself is an appealing little self-contained world, like a futuristic Little Town on the Prairie.  And then Dian leaves that safe world, on a dangerous journey that takes heart-breaking turns.  Even though I had read this before, I was completely caught up in the story again, on the edge of my seat and reading straight through the evening.

Laurie King has also said that she sees this as part of a trilogy (and the middle book at that), but she hasn't yet found the time to write the other two books.  As much as I love her Mary Russell books, and hope for another Kate Martinelli story, I also hope that she does find the time and space that she needs to return to the Valley.  I want to know what happens next to these people, and I want to know for sure that Tomas came home safely.

The clash of the Titans in Tilling

Mapp & Lucia, E.F. Benson

I've been reading my way through The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson for several weeks now.  I only read one or two at a time, rather than through the whole book as I would a novel.  I read a lot of multi-book sagas, and I sometimes find short stories too short, like I hardly get to know the characters before the story ends.  Fay over at Read, Ramble posted about a different approach, with a quote from Mavis Gallant: "Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait."

I'll be honest that I'm also reading slowly because some of them are scaring me silly.  I made the mistake of picking up the book late one night and starting the first story, "The Room in the Tower" (which you can read here).  I had to give up half-way through, and I hesitated a moment before turning off the light afterwards.  My favorite so far, and one of the best ghost stories I have ever read, is "How Fear Departed From the Long Gallery" (which you can read here).

I was reading "Machoan" the other day, and I noticed with pleasure that not only does the narrator live in Tilling, but his house with its garden room and big bow windows reminded me of Mallards, the home first of Elizabeth Mapp and then the immortal Emmeline Lucas.  I got down my copy of Mapp & Lucia to compare the descriptions, and suddenly like Lucia herself I felt "a leading," the irresistible temptation to spend a few days in Tilling.

I think Mapp & Lucia is my favorite of the series.  It opens in the village of Riseholme, scene of so many of Lucia's triumphs and disasters in the early books.  Her first year of widowhood is drawing to an end, and she is ready to emerge from seclusion and take her place in society again.  We meet old friends like Daisy Quantock, who in the absence of Lucia has taken on organizing an Elizabethan pageant, with herself in the starring role. She offers Lucia the supremely insignificant role of Sir Francis Drake's wife.  But Lucia is making other, grander plans.  In the Times, she has seen an advertisement for Mallards, a house to let in Tilling for the summer months.  Though she cannot resist rescuing the pageant from Daisy's inept management, with her faithful courtier Georgie Pillson, she moves on to "fresh woods and pastures new."

Elizabeth Mapp is thrilled to have such an eligible tenant for her house (not to mention one willing to pay her exorbitant charges).  She plans to take Lucia under her wing, to introduce her protegée to Tilling society, to "run her."  Lucia has plans of her own, with skills honed and tactics perfected in the drawing rooms of Riseholme.  The clash of these two Titans is epic, though it may be fought only over Lobster à la Riseholme or the selection of pictures for the Art Society Exhibition.  Part of the great satisfaction of this book is that Mapp proves such a worthy opponent.  No one in Riseholme was really a match for Lucia.

Another great part of the fun is of course the society of Tilling, with Major Benjy, Diva Plaistow, the Wyses with their Rolls-Royce, the "quaint" painter Irene, and the Birmingham-born Scots-speaking Padre and his "wee wifie," all introduced in the earlier book Miss Mapp.  Like us, they take a keen interest in the battle for supremacy, but they can also take an active part and their allegiances constantly shift between the two.  Only Georgie, installed in his own small house, remains consistently loyal to Lucia.

This is such a perfect gem of a book, and now Rye, the model for Tilling, is on my list to visit on my next (someday) visit to England.

A life in politics

Climbing the Bookshelves, Shirley Williams

I can't remember where I came across mention of this book, but when I realized Shirley Williams is Vera Brittain and George Caitlin's daughter, I immediately went looking for a copy.  Over the past two years, I have read all three of Vera Brittain's "Testaments" (Youth, Friendship and Experience) as well as England's Hour, her 1941 book about the Battle of Britain.  I admit, I thought of this book primarily in terms of Vera Brittain.  From the first pages, though, I found Shirley Williams interesting and engaging in her own right.  Now Baroness Williams of Crosby, she has spent much of her life in politics and in public service, with a particular focus on social justice issues.  I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I'm not giving it back to interlibrary loan and the Grinnell College Libraries until I get my own copy.

Born in 1930, Shirley Williams spent her first years in the unusual family unit described in her mother's books, comprising her parents, her brother John, the household staff Amy and Charles Burnett, and her mother's closest friend Winifred Holtby.  John uncannily resembled their uncle Edward Brittain, Vera's dearly-beloved only sibling, killed in the Great War, and she doted on him.  The young Shirley in turn shared a special bond with her father, George Caitlin, an intellectual who longed to play an active role in politics but was completely unsuited for its rough-and-tumble reality.  The bookshelves of the title were his, which he encouraged her to climb, unbeknownst to her mother.

"My father gave me the single greatest gift with which a child can be endowed, self-confidence . . . That I was a girl was irrelevant to his ambitions for me. I could be anything I wanted to be. His feminism was not an intellectual construct. Quite simply, he saw no reason to think that women were lesser beings than men. Until I was sixteen or so, it never occurred to me that this was a rare attitude for a man born in the nineteenth century to take."

Caitlin also passed on to his daughter his Catholic faith, shared by the Burnetts, who took her to church with them and who also provided much of the warmth and human contact of her childhood.  I wondered if her commitment to social justice issues was shaped at all by her Catholic faith.  She does note that she became aware of and disturbed by inequality as a young child.  She was particularly struck by one family of children attending her elementary school, who had to take turns coming to school, because they had only two pairs of boots shared among them all.

When the Second World War broke out, her parents made the difficult decision to send the children to friends in the United States, not because of the bombing but because they feared arrest if the Nazis invaded England.  John and Shirley spent four years of the war in Minnesota, in a Midwest strongly isolationist until the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Both children would return to England in 1943.  After taking a degree at Oxford Shirley came back to America in 1952, as a Fulbright scholar studying at Columbia University.  She would return to the United States again in the 1970s, as a Fellow and later professor in he John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard University.   Her American experiences are interesting in themselves, and they also give her something of an insider's perspective.

Williams gave up the last few months of her Fulbright to return to England to stand as a parliamentary candidate.  She lost that election, but in 1964 won a seat representing a district in Hertfordshire, as a Labour candidate.  Most of the book focuses on her career in the Labour Party, in Parliament, and as a minister in successive Labour governments.  As she discovered in 1964, Parliament was very much an "old boys' club," and changes were slow in coming.  Gender equality and women's rights would be important issues for her, both in and out of government.  In 1981, she joined other prominent Labor politicians in forming the new Social Democratic Party, which later merged with the Liberal Party to form today's Liberal Democrats.  Williams was raised to the peerage in 1993.  In her later years, she has focused on nuclear non-proliferation and on international cooperation, particularly in crises like the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.

As an American, I don't feel that I could fully appreciate (or understand) Williams' analysis of British politics.  Many of the politicians she mentions were unfamiliar to me.  I did resort to google for some terms, like "quango" and "shadow cabinet."   Much of her work as a minister involved education, and though I briefly attended school in England in the early 1980s, I sometimes found her analysis there difficult to follow as well.  Her observations on American society and politics, on the other hand, are both pertinent and interesting.  I found her discussion of the state of modern both depressing and inspiring.

"Several things attracted me to politics when I was young  . . .  I wanted to make the world a better place . . . Dedication, idealism, enthusiasm, excitement; these are not words most people today associate with politics. The loss of trust in politicians has been as dramatic as the more recent loss of trust in bankers . . . "

It is good to be reminded that there are still those striving to make their community, their country, their world a better place - Shirley Williams among them.

A mother lost

Please Look After Mom, Kyung-Sook Shin

In the United States, we sometimes use "lost" as an indirect euphemism for death.  We say, "He lost his wife last year."  There are also frequent stories in the media of someone lost, an individual (often with dementia) who has wandered away from home, or who has run away.  Sometimes the person is quickly found safe and brought home again.  In other cases, there is no happy ending.  In Please Look After Mom, a family faces the heart-breaking possibility that their mother So-nyo, who is missing, may be dead, and may never be found.  She was traveling with their father from their home in a small rural village to Seoul.  Usually one of their four adult children would meet their elderly parents at the train station, but this time their father said he could negotiate the subway on his own.  On their way to the subway cars, the husband and wife became separated.  In the crowd, he did not even realize for some time that she wasn't on the train.  When he went back to the station to look for her, she had disappeared. 

The book opens with the single line, "It's been one week since Mom went missing."  As the children search, frantically and fruitlessly, the story moves back and forth between the present day and the past.  They grew up in the small village, where their mother supported the family by farming and also by turning her hand to any kind of craft that could save money or make money, like brewing malt for sale to a local brewery.  Herself uneducated and illiterate, she was determined to send her children, including her daughters, to school.  Most of this work, and that of caring for the children, fell on her alone.  Her husband was often absent, simply walking out of the house and disappearing for long periods.  It is never clear what exactly he did during these absences, which usually ended with him quietly returning home and picking up his place in the family's life.

As the children search for their mother, they remember, and their memories spark questions, shake assumptions, change their understanding of their mother and of themselves.  The narration for most of the book is in the second person ("The family is gathered at your eldest brother Hyong-chol's house . . . You decide to make flyers . . . ").  It moves between the children and the parents, in five sections that each focuses on a different character (though we hear almost nothing from the second son, not even his name).  The story is linear, as it follows the search, but within that frame-work it moves back and forth in time, in people's memories.  With the shifts in narrative, we as readers learn things about the different characters, secrets never revealed, which change how we understand the family and especially the mother, So-nyo.  I found my picture of her constantly changing as I learned more about her, even in the final chapters.

There is so much going on in this deep, absorbing story.  This is the first novel set in South Korea that I have read, and I was fascinated with the setting, with all the details of daily life, both on the farm and in the city. The parents were born in the 1930s, so their lives span the terrifying years of the Korean War, as well as the changes in South Korea after the war, including urbanization and the decline of rural life, as people moved from the farms to jobs in the cities.  The father's restless wanderings are a reaction to the stresses of the war, during which he lost both his parents and two brothers, and of the unsettled peace (as well as the challenges of raising four children).  One by one, as the children finished their education in the village schools, they followed their eldest brother to Seoul.  With jobs and families, their lives were centered in the city, and they returned home less and less often.  The younger daughter even moved with her husband to the United States, where they lived for several years before returning home to Seoul.

This story, though, also speaks to universal themes of parents and children: of the shifts in relationship as children become adults and parents themselves; of parents who feel they are losing children to independence and their own lives; of children struggling for that independence yet still reverting to childhood at times;  and of the moment when children (sometimes very belatedly and with a sense of shock) realize their parents are individuals with an identity beyond "mother" or "father," with their own stories, their own lives.

This is also a story of profound loss and grief.  We are never told directly what has happened to So-nyo, and though we can guess, the family may never know.  As hard as the finality of death is, I cannot imagine how one copes with the grief of uncertainty, the fading of hope.  The heart-breaking last line, a prayer, gives the book its title: "Please, please look after Mom."  I think that might be what many of us feel in the face of death; we crave the certainty that our lost loved one is safe.

Kyung-Sook Shin won the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize for Please Look After Mom, the first woman to do so.  I didn't read any of the other other nominees (though Fay over at Read, Ramble posted about the books and the award itself).  I think this is an amazing book, and I am glad to see its excellence recognized in the award, and in reviews both on blogs and in print media.

The Napoleonic Wars, with dragons

Crucible of Gold, Naomi Novik

This is the seventh book in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which could be described as "the Napoleonic Wars with dragons."  Though I have loved books about dragons ever since I discovered Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books and Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels (at least the early ones), I was somewhat hesitant to try Novik's books, which I'd also seen described as "Patrick O'Brian with dragons."  But I was instantly hooked from the first pages of the first book, His Majesty's Dragon. 

In her alternate history, dragons were domesticated millenia ago, by the Romans, the Chinese, and the Japanese, among others.  There are many different breeds, with different capabilities, but most of the domestic breeds are intelligent and capable of human speech.  At least among the European breeds, a dragonet put "under harness" and formally named at hatching bonds with a human partner, who trains the young dragon, especially for war.  In this world, the dragons are aerial weapons, both for offense and defense, with the British dragons organized into an Aerial Corps under their own officers, up to admirals.  Despite the importance of the dragons, though, neither they nor the Corps are popular; ancient fears of dragons run too deep.  In one of my favorite twists, one breed will accept only female captains, so women serve in the Corps on active duty and with equal rank, though this is a closely-guarded secret.

Naomi Novik is a big fan of both Jane Austen and Patrick O'Brian, and it shows.  In His Majesty's Dragon, which I think the best of the series, we are introduced to Captain Will Laurence of the Royal Navy just as his ship is capturing the French ship Amitié.  In its hold the crew discovers a large dragon's egg, close to hatching.  Laurence realizes that one of his officers must attempt to harness the dragonet, since England needs every dragon she can muster in the fight against Napoleon and France.  To his dismay, the baby dragon turns to him.  Realizing that this means the end of his naval career, Laurence accepts his duty and harnesses him, naming him "Temeraire" after a famous dreadnought.  It costs him even more when his father Lord Allendale all but disowns him and the woman he loves breaks their informal engagement.  The later discovery that Temeraire is a rare Chinese Celestial  dragon, intended as a gift for Napoleon, proves some consolation, but Laurence finds more in Temeraire himself, a dragon of rare ability and a warm heart, and the two form a strong partnership.

They have had many adventures over land and sea in these seven books, which have taken them to China, Africa, and in the sixth book to Australia.  At times they have taken their part in the wars against Napoleon, as part of a fighting wing.  At others they have gone their own way, facing dismissal from the service and even charges of treason.  Both Laurence and Temeraire (who has studied political and economic theory, among other topics) are stubborn, refusing to act against their conscience or to allow the ends to justify the means.  They are classic square pegs, unable to fit easily into the round holes of the service that desperately needs them.  The narration alternates between Laurence's and Temeraire's points of view, and Novik gives each his distinct voice and personality, as indeed she does with all the major characters, dragon and human alike.  Laurence is especially interesting to me.  Among the rough and ready Corps, he tries to maintain naval-style discipline (without resorting of course to the cat); he tries always to act as a gentleman, with an endearing formality that brings to mind Jane Austen's Captain Wentworth and Mr. Knightley.

In Crucible of Gold, Laurence and Temeraire, who had been exiled to Australia, are asked to join an embassy to Brazil.  Napoleon is bringing in fierce dragons to attack the Portuguese interests there, which may force their government to divert resources from Europe, where Wellington is preparing for the Peninsula campaign.  But their embassy is diverted in turn to the western side of the vast continent, where the Incan empire still holds sway.  In this world, the Incan dragons proved more than a match for the Spanish conquistadors, though European diseases still decimated the population.

I enjoyed this book so much.  It is fast-paced and full of action, with shipwrecks and mutinies and dragon battles and naval actions, and even pirates.  And it brings together old friends and comrades in arms (or in the air) from previous books.  This would not be a good introduction to the series, though, building as it does on the complex backstory of the six previous books, as well as the large cast of continuing characters (including Napoleon himself).  It is the penultimate book in the series; Novik has announced that the eighth book will be the last, and I will be so sorry to see it published, while already anxious to read it and see where it takes Laurence and Temeraire next.