Finally, Avan, an up-and-coming civil servant, decides that the only way to rectify this injustice is to take Daverak to court.

Haner and Selendra are two eligible young women, and Bon’s death means both that they’ll be separated into different households and that their dowries will be too paltry to attract mates of the right standing. Berend, who was lucky enough to get married with a healthy dowry a few years before, is caught in the middle between her husband and her family. This situation affects each of Bon’s five children in different ways: Penn, a parson, agreed to allow Bon to confess his sins on his deathbed, which is an act of heresy according to the strictures of dragon religion. 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. How I got it: Bought a copy from a used book store

Tooth and claw walton