To Shape a Dragon's Breath
The Nampeshiweisit series, Book 1
Moniquill Blackgoose
Del Rey
Fiction, YA Fantasy
****+ (Good/Great)
DESCRIPTION: Generations ago, the pale Anglish came across the ocean to plunder and colonize the land of the Naquisit and beyond to the west. With them came the Great Dying that decimated the native dragons, leaving the invaders the undisputed masters and the tribes with little defense as more people were slaughtered or enslaved and more land was taken. Though technically the "nackies" are considered citizens now, public sentiment and treaty enforcement are notoriously malleable; it hasn't even been twenty years since the discovery of coal led to the near-extermination of a neighboring island. Fortunately, Anequs's own remote island home of Masquapaug has no such resources that the Anglish covet, and her people have mostly been left alone - but that changes the day that the sixteen-year-old girl sees a rare native Nampeshiwe dragon, and finds the egg it leaves behind. When that egg hatches, the young Kasaqua chooses Anequs to bond with, making her the first Nampeshiweisit - dragon companion - in living memory... but it has been too many years since her people have lived with dragons, and the old dances and lore have been lost. Without training, a dragon's "breath" is a truly dangerous thing, reducing anything it touches to component elements in potentially disastrous reactions. And if her people have forgotten how to do that, the Anglish are masters of their dragons.
Unfortunately, by reaching out to the local Ministry of Dragon Affairs, Anequs threatens to upset the fragile peace of insignificance that has kept Masquapaug relatively free from Anglish interference. The very thought of a savage nackie bonding with a dragon is close to blasphemy in the eyes of many Anglishmen; even among their own kind, there are strict protocols over who is even allowed to be near a dragon's egg, and if a beast bonds with the wrong person, it might be forcibly removed or even put to death, with the unfortunate human treated little better. If Anequs wants to be allowed to keep Kasaqua, she must travel to the Anglish city of Varmarden and attend Kuiper's Academy of Natural Philosophy and Skiltakraft, to learn the Anglish art and science of being a "dragoneer". She has one year to prove herself, not just as a fit keeper of a dragon, but as a civilized human among those who think her kind little better than animals. Plunged head-first into a foreign culture of contradictory and often cruel rules and customs, surrounded by students and staff who expect her to fail, and with her every move under the microscope of official and public scrutiny, Anequs refuses to give in to despair... but the stakes are far higher than she realizes, far higher than just one young woman and a dragon. For the success or failure of Anequs and Kasaqua may mean the difference between the survival and freedom of the Naquisit people, or their extermination.
REVIEW: Several elements of To Shape a Dragon's Breath are rather familiar: a bonded dragon, an underdog "fish out of water" heroine, a magic academy, even an alternate Earth. Where this book stands out is its highly imaginative setting. The world is distinguished not only by dragons and their "breath" magic (and implied human magic, if lost in the distant past), but by an alternate history where the Europeans who conquered the Americas were of Viking culture, not Christian... and this culture has come to a steampunk-level of technology, with trains and telegrams and automaton carriages and such, much of it apparently reliant on the abilities of dragons to break materials down to component elements and remake them (a discipline known as "skiltakraft"). Even as Anequs introduces the reader to her native culture, she also shows an outsider's perspective on the Anglish colonizers, a mixture of technological wonders and steep social stratification and oppression; not being Christian has not made the pale foreigners any less rigid in their senses of genetic and cultural superiority, propriety, and boxing everyone into their perceived proper places. Her brother abandoned the island to live among the Anglish, studying engineering (and creating tensions within the family, who do not understand his passion or his dreams of integrating Anglish technology with his native culture), and becomes an ally in helping Anequs navigate the strange new world she's in, one she previously only knew (or thought she knew) from "pennik" novel adventures.
At the academy, Anequs encounters the expected mix of friends and foes. Her proper roommate, Marta, is the only other female "dragoneer" student in the school - women of high birth are not precisely forbidden a dragon bond, but it's uncommon and generally seen more as a stepping stone to a good marriage than a legitimate pursuit and career in its own right - and has no real idea what to make of a "nackie" girl, for all that she tries, in her often fumbling way, to be friendly and "civilize" the darker-skinned stranger. Also at the school is Theod, a Naquisit-born young man stripped of his culture after being raised in an orphanage and bonded into service; his own dragon bonding was an unfortunate mistake, and he himself struggles to keep his aspirations low enough not to attract more attention than "his kind" is due in Anglish society; encountering the headstrong and outspoken Anequs, he is almost as flummoxed as Marta, unable to understand why she, too, doesn't embrace this chance to cast off her "savage" culture (which he only knows of through Anglish-penned "histories") and join "civilized" society, even if she'll always be seen as a "nackie" first and a woman second (and human distant third - and that's even before she realizes that her nonbinary nature makes her that much more of an outsider and potential pariah). Among the professors, reactions to her admission run the gauntlet from fascinated interest to outright hostility, and the whole of the city of Varmarden seems to be watching her with sometimes-fascinated, sometimes-horrified interest. Through it all, Anequs holds firm to her own convinctions and her culture, determined not to let Anglish ways change her irrevocably; she has come to the academy to learn what she must to keep Kasaqua and shape her breath, and earn the right to be her "dragoneer" (though she resents the term from the outset; the native word "Nampeshiweisit" implies a partnership with a dragon, while the Anglish word is more about discipline and dominance), and that is all. Of course, she cannot help being changed somewhat, her exposure to the larger world beyond her island helping her to understand far more about her life, her family, and her people and the Anglish.
The story moves fairly well, occasionally slowing down as some elements of the world and the Anglish and histories and such are elaborated upon. Personal and public sentiments toward Anequs and Kasaqua shift throughout, but she remains a deterimined heroine, generally not content to sit back and passively accept what comes to her. Where the story threatened to lose its extra half-star was at the ending, which felt a little forced (and also like it forgot some other plot threads and elements that wouldn't have felt as out-of-the-blue as a few developments that dropped in in the last fifty-odd pages), and with some elements of the worldbuilding. Yes, I know I said that the setting was one of this book's strongest suits, but some of the names and terms (especially the Anglish ones) become blurs, mentioned here and there in passing with too little to attach them to in my brain to be memorable, leaving me wondering if I'd encountered this or that word before when I came to them again. As part of the commitment to the alt-history, Blackgoose even uses alternate names for academy subjects ("al-jabr" instead of algebra) and elements in the rudimentary periodic table used in skiltakrafting, which put a definite foot over the "smeerp" line for me. ("Smeerps" are made-up terms for something that's basically something familiar, but made to sound "cooler"/more fantastic and exotic with fancy names that bog down a story by calling too much attention to themselves; an animal that acts like a rabbit and is basically a rabbit can just be called a "rabbit" instead of a "smeerp" even if it's not genetically and evolutionarily an Earthborn lagomorph, unless there's a darned good in-story reason they need to be set aside with a special term.) Much as I admired the depth of imagination and research, I was still trying to juggle new terms and concepts and dragon species and political structures and nationalities; expecting me to remember alternate terms for iron, carbon, lead, and such just felt like one plate too many to consistently keep in the air. (And if you're going that far - why stop there? Why not alternate names for all the food and beverages and furniture?) I also felt that Kasaqua and the other dragons sometimes receded too far into the background. In the end, the overall imagination and originality counterbalanced the relatively minor drawbacks to land at four and a half stars in the ratings.
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