Book completed
The Tropic of Serpents, by Marie Brennan. Memoirs of Lady Trent #2. This time, our intrepid dragon naturalist, Isabella, visits her world's equivalent of Africa, so that she can learn about the dragons of the savannah and, she hopes, the rainforest of a very swampy river delta. Meanwhile, her government hopes to get the native leaders to agree to flood that delta with a great dam, to make it easier for them to extract the local minerals. Isabella has some surprising adventures, learns more about dragons, and generally does the right thing.
I saw on Storygraph that some readers decided not to continue the series after the first book, because to them it felt like just more Victorian colonialism. They were missing out, as it's clearly the author's project to educate her protagonist and develop her sympathies toward the people she meets and against the greed of (many of) her own people. When Isabella refers her readers to other authors for related topics she doesn't have time to address in her memoirs, those authors are invariably indigenous. It's a fun series, for multiple reasons.