Kyrie

What an absolutely gorgeous book! The illustrations are stunning.

The entries for each bird are fairly short, and usually comprise of either folklore related to the bird (birblore, if you will) or literary examples that the birds are short-hand for. IE albatrosses representing a psychological burden, that sort of thing.

Look. I listen to a LOT of true crime. I've desensitized myself to a lot of things. But there's a section where Dan Lafferty is describing what he and Ron did that I just couldn't listen to. I had to skip over it, because it was too horrific, and too heartbreaking.

The book splits itself into three different (yet relevant) narratives - the founding of the LDS church and its subsequent fundamentalist branch, modern (at the time) coverage of those fundamentalist groups and their focus on plural marriage, and how they all factored into the murder of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter.

The history is definitely interesting, but it left me more angry than anything else.

I do want to shout out the doctor on the prosecution's side though, who, when being asked why he didn't believe that Ron Lafferty was mentally ill, said, "You want to know how I know he isn't schizophrenic? Because he has books in his cell. He is able to pick and choose pieces from what he's read, and discuss them reasonably with other people. A person with schizophrenia suffering from delusions would not be able to focus enough to retain information and then discuss it in such a straightforward manner."

mic drop 🎤

Aaaaaaah! I thought that artwork looked familiar! I remember when she was first creating the icons that she's turned into the characters. 🥰

The description of this book notes that it is an exact reprint of the original 1910 version, and you can tell. There are a few typos, and each page in my copy has the page number written out, as well as numerically noted at the bottom of the page.

The creatures are all interesting, and clearly tongue-in-cheek.

I do feel like they could have better formatted the illustrations - they're all printed landscape, so that you've got to turn the book sideways to look at the pictures. Which, not a huge deal...but all of the pictures are also enlarged from their original sizes, with the blur to show for it.

Still. My husband bought this for me as a tribute to my folklore shelf, so I love it.

The Tropic of Serpents was definitely a step up from A Natural History of Dragons. Not that I thought the first book was bad. There's just a noticeable difference in the pacing and ratio of human/dragon interaction from the first book to the second.

The second book of Lady Trent's memoir opens with the notes on dragon bone preservation being stolen during the yearly symposium. I admirably resisted the urge to shake my fist and scream, “WERNSTROM!!!”

Yep. Definitely resisted the urge. Did not do that. At all.

But, opening scenes aside, the symposium theft didn't really matter. Or at least, it hadn't mattered by the end of the book, and it wasn't even the main focus of the story.

The real plot is centered around Isabella and company going into the Memoir version of a rain forest to study dragons. And then, politics get involved. As opposed to the first book, which was distinctly lacking in actual interactions with dragons, this book actually has Isabella studying living dragons in their natural habitat. It still takes a while to build up to that point, granted, but it's there.

Most of the story is focused on character building, though. There's a wonderful scene, about halfway through the book that was an obvious characterization dump, but hearing the characters speak so frankly about their thoughts and emotions was so sweet that it didn't bother me at all.

The pacing here is much slower than in the first book, and it takes more time to set up the geography and culture of the area, so I definitely enjoyed this one a little more.