How to Train Your Dragon
Dragons, yes, but also potty humor
Hi all, happy Snarf Day to you. If you know anyone who could use more Snarf in their lives, please forward this along. And if after reading this, you find yourself wanting reviews of more wholesome content, here are the archives.
Now onto…
The Series: How to Train Your Dragon
The Author and Illustrator: Cressida Cowell
Length/Picture Density: 200-250 pages, illustrations on most spreads
If you’ve seen the How to Train Your Dragon movies or any of the spinoff series on Netflix, you might think the books are a fairly conventional coming-of-age story about a young lad who discovers the nuance and beauty of a misunderstood species and unites his people around the ethos of cooperation just in the nick of time to save them from an approaching danger.
And you’d be wrong.
Sure, there are elements of all that in the source material: coming-of-age? Check. Boy who seeks to communicate and compromise while others scream and shout their dragons into submission? Check. The whole better living through cooperation thing? Buzzer sound and flashing X’s. You won’t find much of that in here. But you will find fart jokes.
The names of the characters will do a pretty good job of communicating what kind of humor salts every paragraph of these books. Are main character is Hiccup, his best friend is Fishlegs, his nemesis is Snotlout, his father is Stoick the Vast, the guy who teaches all the young men (women are few and far between in these stories) to be warriors is named Gobber the Belch.
The illustrations have a scribbled feel that also communicate that these books are not taking themselves seriously.
No one is simply kind and competent. Hiccup comes the closest, but he is at best average at everything he’s judged on in this world like sword fighting, dragon wrangling, and shouting insults (Gobber the Belch teaches a class in this). Snotlout is good at all of that, but is a bully who wants Hiccup dead for throne-succession reasons.
Hiccup’s main differentiator is that he can talk to dragons. Some suspension of disbelief is required around the fact that he’s the only one who can do it, seeing as he seems to have picked it up just by reading a few books.
The aspect of every character being seriously flawed that I most enjoyed (and one of the biggest departures from the movies) is Hiccup’s dragon Toothless. In the movies, I remember him as being a sort of curious and ultimately benevolent dog with wings. In the books he’s, well, maybe more what it would be like if you had a winged dog who could talk to you. He’s not especially interested in doing what Hiccup says, and usually needs to be cajoled with food or a play to his ego. His relationship with Hiccup grows into something of a bond over time, and he bursts through with an occasional heroic moment.
The storytelling here is pretty good. The tension builds well, the bad guys are despicable, and the victories are satisfying. Even if you’re cringing regularly, you’ll still want to keep going to know what happens.
The story gets interrupted sometimes by information pages on various dragon species. Those would probably be fun for a kid reading on their own, but I often skipped them because they messed with the flow of the story and don’t add too much.
Oh, and be ready for a fair amount of carnage. Dragons eat dragons, people kill dragons, and plenty of nameless (and occasionally named) human bad guys are dispatched with all the ceremony of a 90s action movie.
There are occasional moments of tenderness, which can provide a sentimental sheen to the many pages of booger humor that precede them. And despite everyone else seemingly driven by ego, conquest, and blood lust, Hiccup shows some good judgment and moral compass, when given the opportunity.
These books are actually pretty clever, they just provide no respite, not even for a page, from a sense of humor that might not be what you’re looking to introduce or cultivate. I didn’t feel like they were a bad influence on Leo, but it’s possible we lucked out.