My Father's Dragon
The charm hides all sorts of clumsy storytelling.
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Now onto…
The Series: My Father’s Dragon
The Author: Ruth Stiles Gannett
The Illustrator: Ruth Chrisman Gannett (I would sometimes wonder while reading this what the relationship between the author and illustrator was, based on their names).
Length/Picture density: 80ish pages, pictures on most spreads
You know how some books get away with a lot of stuff that others wouldn’t just because they have a certain charm that makes you forgive them or just not notice? That’s the My Father’s Dragon trilogy. It has a confident protagonist, a very gentle dragon, a plot that balances adventure and whimsy, and it’s somehow enough to make you ignore all the parts that don’t really make sense.
We’ll get to all that. First let’s back up and zoom out. These three books tell the story of a boy who rescues a dragon, helps it return home, and then helps his family out of a dicey situation. There’s a pleasing linearity to the whole thing, and the series feels like a real trilogy – a story told in three parts, no more, no less – in a way that’s hard to achieve these days when once you have interested readers, there’s an obvious incentive to keep milking that. (I do not begrudge publishers or the entertainment industry one bit for this – getting the attention of paying customers is hard.)
Now that I’ve praised the cohesiveness of the overarching story, I have to undercut that by mentioning that the second installment, Elmer and the Dragon, is a totally random story that centers on a canary looking for buried treasure. Elmer and the dragon are still the main characters, but it has no real connection, not even a thematic one, to the other two books. I don’t know if this is actually true, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the author had been working on a completely separate story about canaries, which she then worked into this series after the success of her first book.
Still, the stories have a nice simplicity to them. There’s enough of a throughline to make them build toward a satisfying conclusion, but the narrative is fairly episodic and easy to follow. The dragon is gentle and harmless, and Elmer has a reassuring confidence. The two of them, and the sense that everything is going to work out just fine, make these for a fun and relaxing read.
Which is why these books are looked on fondly over seven decades after the first one was published, despite having a bunch of details that don’t hold up to scrutiny.
In the first book, things work out for Elmer in ways that kids won’t care about, but defy any real logic. He’s saved multiple times by the vanity of the wild animals who come very close to killing and eating him, and his cat’s ability to psychically predict the exact scenarios he will end up in, including how he can avoid getting mauled by providing each animal with a cosmetic fix. Okay, that sentence didn’t make a ton of sense, but it does accurately describe several scenes in the book.
The first book refers to Elmer as “my father” throughout, and the next two drop that without any attempt at explaining it. I have competing theories as to what’s going on here. The Occam’s Razor conclusion would be that the author initially had plans to introduce Elmer’s kid in a future volume and then later decided to just keep Elmer as a young boy. My alternate theory is that the first story (but for some reason not any of the subsequent ones) is narrated by Elmer’s cat. This theory hangs entirely on the fact that the cat says something at the beginning of the book about crocodiles, which then comes back when the narrator says “as I told you before, crocodiles…” and then repeats the same fact.
How about Elmer’s parents? Do the books kill them off on the first page like so many other books so that the kid can have his own adventure? Nope, these books provide the same kid-on-a-journey premise by making Elmer’s parents hilariously negligent, and Elmer willing to run off with very little prompting (or emotional anguish). Over the first two books, Elmer disappears for two weeks, shows up again with a gold watch and some other fancy things, does not explain himself, and his parents make some kind of “kids these days” comment and go on with their lives.
Oh, and quick word of warning: in the beginning of the first book, Elmer’s mom whips him for secretly keeping a cat in the house. It’s just a quick mention, and I’ve always been able to skip over it when reading aloud. It doesn’t add anything to the story, it’s just a detail that is treated as unremarkable.
I saved my favorite detail for last. I really can’t think of anything comparable in anything I’ve read or watched. If you can, do please leave me a note. Elmer meets the dragon at the end of the first book, has a random canary-focused adventure with him in the second book, and then in the third one we start with the dragon on the last leg of his journey home before reuniting with Elmer a few chapters in. It is only midway through the third book that both Elmer and the reader learn the dragon’s name.
This isn’t some kind of big reveal. This is not a “Luke, I am your father” moment. It’s a “tell them Boris sent you, which is my name – a fact that has somehow not come up this entire time.” It’s like if, say, Sherlock Holmes solved several mysteries with that other guy before finding out his name was Watson because it came up when they checked into a hotel or something.
With other stories, I might be mad or frustrated with something like that, but with this one I’m just amazed.
These books are fun to make fun of, but they do have real charm, and they’re great for kids just starting to get into chapter books.