Tooth and Claw

Tooth and Claw is a Victorian novel of manners in which every character is a dragon. Jo Walton took her model from Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage and built a society that runs on its logic: dragons grow by eating the flesh of other dragons, the weak and the dead are food, and a maiden's golden scales turn pink when an unrelated male touches her, a visible sign that she is spoken for.

The story opens at the deathbed of Bon Agornin, a dragon of humble origins who has risen in the world. His five children gather: Penn, a parson; Avan, the younger son; Berend, married to the powerful Illustrious Daverak; and the two unmarried daughters, Haner and Selendra. By custom the family eats the body, and Daverak takes far more than his share. Avan goes to law to get it back. Bon also makes a deathbed confession to Penn, who absolves him, which puts the parson in a difficult position with his church. The sisters are separated, Haner going to live with Daverak and Selendra with Penn, and Frelt, a priest who works with Penn, asks Selendra to marry him; she refuses, but his advances turn her scales pink all the same. In the end Sher Benandi fights Daverak to the death, the Agornins get both his wealth and his body, Avan wins his case, and Selendra marries Sher.

Walton tells it through an omniscient narrator with a Victorian voice, full of propriety and dry wit, and the joke never quite stops being a joke: the dragons worry about propriety and inheritance while eating each other. It is also a clear eyed look at class and at the constraints on women in the society Trollope wrote about. The pace is leisurely, which suits some readers and tries others. It suits readers of Trollope, Austen or Gaskell, and fantasy readers who want something without a quest or a war.