Summary: Don't miss this deluxe edition of How to Train Your Dragon, featuring two brand new stories plus a full color poster!
In Book One, travel back to the days when Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III 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? Will he become a truly extraordinary hero?
The action continues in two brand new short stories! The Day of the Dreader is the tale of a truly dreadful Seadragon who challenges the Hairy Hooligans to a standoff! In How to Train Your Viking, we get a dragon's eye view when Toothless the Dragon narrates an epic tale!
Thoughts: I read this book aloud to one of my younger brothers and we both got a kick out of it! AS long time fans of the movie, my brother being a particularly large admirer, I couldn't resist this wonderful copy when I found it on clearance at our nearest bookstore. Since neither of us wanted to wait for the other to finish we decided I should read it to the both of us.
While vastly different from the movie we came to really love the cast in the book. Hiccup and Toothless's relationship was....a difficult one but by the end you couldn't help but adore them equally. Each and every character felt new and was therefore reopened for the possible chance of like and dislike (though most of them still fell into the same categories). But the development that happened by the end had me and my brother talking about it for a long time afterwards.
The plot was great, complete with a humorously awful beginning and teary-eyed (from still laughing) ending. And the writing carried everything through very well, Cowell inserting some of her own common sense throughout the story. This was really hilariously wonderful during the last short story, Day of the Dreader.
Content: A few crude jokes, several mentions of poo. The dragon take (dragonese) is a garbled jumble of gibberish and some actual words smashed together and one of the words is 'C***' used when mentioning poo. I substituted this word when reading out-loud and it's hardly noticeable being buried in the rest of the jumble but it's still there. Otherwise there's giant dragons threatening death and a man who ends up wearing a dress after losing his clothes.
All in all, fairly clean. While I think my brother loved it more than I ever could (really appeals to boys) I enjoyed every bit of it and will be trying to get my hands on the sequels! A great read for just about any age, whether you're a fan of the movie or not!
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