Bon Agornin has lived a full life of a few hundred years, and he has five living children: two unmarried daughters, Haner and Selendra, still living at home an unmarried son named Avan who lives in the big city of Irieth a son named Penn, married with dragonets, and now a parson and the oldest daughter, Berend, who is married to a nearby aristocrat, the Illustrious Daverak. The story is driven by and the ending succumbs to some of the same ways of thinking that are implicitly criticized, but otherwise Tooth and Claw is a remarkably polished and moving package, self-contained as well, all attributes not often ascribed to fantasy novels. It's an approach that has to prove itself to the wary reader every step of the way, and the surprise of Walton's writing is that she far exceeds expectations. Tooth and Claw is essentially a Victorian novel written as if that strange worldview actually suited the characters in it, rather than the other way around (see my comment later on the theme of biology as destiny). A lazy writer would simply swap the dragons into a story about humans without any other alterations Walton follows through on a much more ambitious strategy. Tooth and Claw is based on an idea that could have gone totally, disastrously wrong: a fantasy story where all the characters are dragons. You have never read a novel like Tooth and Claw.Tooth and Claw, Jo Walton, Tor, 2003, 253 pp. 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.

Now in a new pocket-sized hardcover edition, the World Fantasy Award-winning tale of contention over love and money-among dragons. This Description may be from another edition of this product.

Tooth and claw walton