This book has two narrators: bounty hunter Mirage, tough and fast; and witch-in-training Miryo, earnest and sheltered. Miryo learns that she has to kill her doppelganger, which she’s never met, to come into her full power; obviously, Mirage has something to say about that. Good worldbuilding with an interesting premise, but both Miryo and Mirage feel a little flat as characters; they’re incomplete halves of a whole and don’t really have a lot of character growth to do. First in a series.
Tag: author-marie brennan
A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir of Lady Trent, by Marie Brennan
This memoir begins with Lady Trent acknowledging her own status as a famous dragon naturalist, but reminding the reader that she was once a girl, the daughter of a wealthy landowner, and as such was expected to forgo unseemly activities like reading science texts and studying natural history, and especially was dissuaded from studying dragons. Because it’s a memoir, you know that Isabella eventually achieves her dream of a life of adventure and scientific study, but in this volume you get to relive her early history of rebellion, her attempts at courtship, and her journeys of discovery. I loved Isabella’s narrative voice and the occasional interjections from the future Lady Trent, putting the tale in perspective.
Driftwood, by Marie Brennan
A dreamy and thoughtful collection of interconnected short stories, told to one another by lost souls. Basically Driftwood is a place where worlds go to die: after some kind of cataclysm, people find that their world is now a fragment of itself, smashed up against other dying worlds, each world gradually diminishing until they disappear in the crush of other worlds. In such a place, you cannot hang on to your past life; if you do not wish to disappear with your world, you must become a drifter, homeless until death. Without permanence, the only foundation that the drifters are able to build are the stories they tell one another.