I love Marie Brennan's style! It's such a fun play with both language and science to put a dragon-research book into this sort of format. 
 I couldn't help but compare this book to Ann Patchett's State of Wonder, since they both take place in dense rainforests inhabited by very foreign-seeming natives. The Tropic of Serpents, strangely enough, struck me as far more realistic than its "realistic fiction" counterpart! Congrats to Marie Brennan for injecting such a lush dose of realism to your land of dragons.