 It's another one of these great books that goes bad halfway through. I'll explain. 32nd review. This is the autobiography of Lady Trent, a lady scientist in an alternate earth that's in a Victorian or Edwardian kind of era. She has pioneered the study of dragons. She was writing the book as an old woman and she writes about her childhood where her interest in dragons came from and developed and her first experiences actually studying them and it is fascinating, but halfway through it turns into a Nancy Drew mystery and it never recovers. This is my last official book review for 2006. I really wanted to go out on a positive note for the year and as I started reading this book, which I checked out from the library here, I was thinking this this is it because this is a great book. I had heard a lot of great things about it. I had seen other reviews who said that they wished that there had been more dragons and more about dragons and I see what they mean now now that I've read the entire thing. This book starts out strong. It starts out extremely strong. The book as I said is written in the form of an autobiography in a kind of Victorian or Edwardian style and the author has captured the style perfectly. She's got it dead on and that's hard to do. The the early part of the book where she talks about her childhood, her personal interest in dragons, her father's library, very convincingly and I think perfectly captured the life of a young girl in England at the time where girls and young women are not supposed to be interested in the sciences and of course she is and she's also very brash and very outspoken about it and it's just she's a great character and she's perfectly captured and we get to follow her as she takes part in an expedition to study dragons in a remote area and it's it gets better and better, but then about halfway through the book it turns into a silly mystery. She and her local handmaiden are sneaking around the mountains at night and in the and in the cellar hallways of the mansion and they uncover a plot of smugglers who are scaring the locals with fake dragon footprints. It is totally Scooby-Doo. At first I was okay with it because I was thinking this is just another part of the book and we'll come back to the study of dragons but the author commits to the Nancy Drew stuff and carries it through all the way to the end of the book and when it came to the last three chapters or so I just didn't care anymore. I mean Marie Brennan really created something great here and then she just lost it. If you followed my book reviews, you've seen me go through this so many times. Authors coming up with a great book and then halfway through they just stop writing and I don't understand it. I'm going to give this book a soft recommendation though because the writing style is so good and the start of the book is so strong and I know there will be people who will love it for that. The fictional science and fictional biography of dragons is spot-on but sadly the book goes nowhere. Please remember to press that like button. It helps my videos get seen and then subscribe so you can come back next time. I do science fiction book TV and movie reviews all the time and please consider becoming a patron. There's a link in the description below.