When Bon’s greedy son-in-law, Daverak, demands more than his fair share of Bon’s body, it sets off a crisis. The twist is that in this world, dragons dispose of remains by eating them. Dragon cannibalism is an accepted part of life, and eating dragonflesh, is, in fact, the primary way which dragons increase in size, strength, and length - and accordingly, their prestige and social status. The Dignified Bon Agornin, a dragon nearly 70 feet in length is on his deathbed, and his children have gathered at the family estate to see to their inheritance and the disposal of his remains.

Tooth and Claw takes all the tropes of regency and Victorian-era fiction - courtship, dowries, parsons and parsonages, servants, inheritances, lawsuits, deathbed confessions, snooty old ladies concerned about their rank in the class system - and sets them in a world where all the main characters are dragons. In What Makes This Book So Great, she talks about how she’s a devoted reader of Anthony Trollope, and how she based much of the plot of Tooth and Claw on his book Framley Parsonage. This is why I’ve realized that Jo Walton is so amazing - she herself is such an avid reader that she’s helped me fill in a lot of the holes in my reading through her second-hand observation and reconstructions. My reading history contains very little in the way of Asimov, Clarke, Butler, Heinlein, or Russ, for example. Hell, I still haven’t read much of the work considered to be classic to SF, which as a genre is generally much younger than most of the work commonly considered to be part of the “official” canon. One of the things I’m self-conscious about as a reader is a fact that I’ve read very few of the classics of the English canon - Dickens, Hardy, Austen, etc. You have never read a novel like Tooth and Claw.How I got it: Bought a copy from a used book store In which society's high-and-mighty members avail themselves of the privilege of killing and eating the weaker children, which they do with ceremony and relish, growing stronger thereby. Here is a world of politics and train stations, of churchmen and family retainers, of courtship and country houses.in which, on the death of an elder, family members gather to eat the body of the deceased.

Now Walton returns with a very different kind of fantasy story: the tale of a family dealing with the death of their father, of a son who goes to law for his inheritance, a son who agonizes over his father's deathbed confession, a daughter who falls in love, a daughter who becomes involved in the abolition movement, and a daughter sacrificing herself for her husband.Įxcept that everyone in the story is a dragon, red in tooth and claw. Jo Walton burst onto the fantasy scene with The King's Peace, acclaimed by writers as diverse as Poul Anderson, Robin Hobb, and Ken MacLeod.

A tale of contention over love and money-among dragons

Jo walton's tooth and claw