Empire of Ivory (Novik, Naomi) 2007

It's good to have Temeraire back with the formation again.  I missed Lily and Maximus (and their people).  In the "about the author" blurb, Novik notes that this was the hardest Temeraire book to write (so far), and it shows.  The narrative doesn't flow quite like it did in the previous three books and it feels like great efforts were made to put the story together, and the end has a big fat "to be continued" on it... and yet, I have a very positive feeling that all this effort is going to pay enormous dividends in the overall story arc.  We'll see.