How to Train Your Dragon

Little, Brown

How to Train Your Dragon
Cressida Cowell
2003

The Summary
"Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III is a truly extraordinary Viking hero known throughout Vikingdom as "the Dragon Whisperer"...but it wasn't always so.  Travel back to the days when the mighty warrior was just a boy, the quiet and thoughtful son of the Chief of the Hairy Hooligans.  Can Hiccup capture a dragon and train it without being torn limb from limb?  Join the adventures as the small boy finds a better way to train his dragon and becomes a hero!"

The Good
How to Train Your Dragon is an excellent book.  It's fun and original and, for a kid of a certain age, it's an awesome book.  It's geared for a younger audience, which is obvious in the writing, but it's still appealing for its silly sense of humor and it's originality.

I really liked the diversity of dragons.  Like the movie of the same title, How to Train Your Dragon has a fantastic variety of dragons with unique skills and traits.  You have dragons that fly and dragons that swim or stomp around; you have dragons the size of a small fruit, and dragons the size of mountains; you have dragons that breath fire, dragons that spit poison, and dragons that chew with their sizable teeth.

It's fun and exciting to see what new dragons the book will introduce next.

Otherwise, I'm afraid I don't have much to say about it, because it's such a short book.  At just a little over a hundred pages (with illustrations taking up a sizable handful of those), it's not a lengthy endeavor by any means.  It's just good, wholesome fun:  Hiccup landing into trouble as he's trying to train his dragon, Hiccup and Toothless struggling to get along, Hiccup coming up with ingenious ways to fight and train dragons.

It's a great kid's novel, and I highly recommend it.

The Bad
I loved watching How to Train Your Dragon.  I loved the diversity of the dragons, the oddball story, the funny and endearing characters.  Honestly, I was a little spoiled by the movies--and so I was a tad disappointed by the book.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great book.  I loved Hiccup, who is shy and thoughtful and nervous, and I couldn't help but enjoy the Hairy Scary Librarian.  (He only received a mention, but I was tickled at the idea.)

But I would warn those who loved the movies shouldn't go into this book with the same expectations or story in mind.  Don't judge the book by its movie, as the saying goes.

The Ugly
Bullying.

And dragons fighting to the death.