“So they went north, the man and the boy, and the roads narrowed, and big slate-headed mountains reared up ready to eat the sky.” What a beautifully written opening line! That plus a boy on a dangerous journey—I’m hooked!

Eleven-year-old Ansel has been mute since his mother’s death a few years earlier. His father, always eager to make money from his children, sends Ansel off with a man who needs a servant boy on his travels. Ansel soon learns that the man, who is named Brock, is a dragon-hunter. Every town they pass through gets treated to Brock’s stories of dragons he’s slain. One night when Brock is away, Ansel looks in the one bag he’s been forbidden to touch and finds…a dragon’s skull!

But Brock explains the next day that actually it’s the head of a giant newt. Whenever he’s hired to kill a dragon, he goes up on the mountain and brings back this head, covered with the brains and meat of a dead sheep. Ansel is both disappointed and relieved to find that the dragon tales are all lies.

Now they arrive at the town that has hired Brock to rid them of a dragon. They learn that before the villagers heard the word of Christ, they used to tether a young girl high up on the mountain to appease the dragon. Brock tells the townspeople his stories and Ansel, sick of hearing the lies, goes outside…where he hears a long, terrible sound that frightens the wolves into silence: the dragon’s cry!

Later he overhears the sobs of a woman and finds out that the townspeople, despite their newfound Christianity, took her daughter up on the mountain for the dragon.

Now the dragon seems all too real, and it’s time for Ansel and Brock to start up the mountain.

Ansel, Brock, and the other characters are very human. They’re likable but fallible: often admirable, sometimes not. Ansel starts feeling sorry for the dragon and made me feel sorry for him, too. This entertaining novel is not the typical good versus evil fantasy.

Reeve is better known for the “Mortal Engine” series of books, which one reviewer called post-apocalyptic steampunk. Apparently director Peter Jackson, of “Lord of the Rings” movie trilogy fame, plans to make a series of movies from the “Mortal Engine” books. Philip Reeve has a nifty website featuring a blog about his writing and artwork (he made beautiful drawings that appear at the beginning of each chapter of the “Dragons” book).

Reading Level: 10 and up.  Frightening scenes of the dragon killing a horse and a man, so it might be too much for sensitive younger readers.

Published 2009

209 pages

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