I’ve been in a dragon mood lately, so I found and made my way through the first five books of the ‘how to train your dragon’ series. For those not in the know, this is a book series about a boy called Hiccup and his dragon Toothless. It’s the book series that inspired the recent film (which I loved). As an aside, the film is going to have a sequel which I am overly excited by.
The book series is a bit different from the films. In the books Toothless is a LOT smaller, and he’s a common garden green dragon, not a night fury. He starts off very very small, and with no teeth which makes Hiccup the butt of more jokes than usual. By book five (there are eleven books) he’s still only the size of a Jack Russell.
In the film dragons are something to be feared and killed, while in the books the Viking tribe Hiccup belongs to routinely uses dragons in everyday life. In fact, the first time we meet Toothless in book one is when Hiccup in a coming of age Viking tradition steals him from a cave to become his first hunting dragon. Hiccup is a lot nicer to dragons than most in his tribe, which gets him mixed results.
In all I’d recommend the series to anyone who really likes dragons and doesn’t mind a bit of juvenile humor (there are a lot of fart and snot jokes here). The targeted audience seems to be boys around ten (which is the age Hiccup starts off at), but as a twenty-six year old woman I still got a lot out of it.
Some of the books were slightly better than others (the first and third books were my favorite), but I enjoyed all of them. I’d give the first five books an overall rating of 4.5 stars.
samaustinwriter 