Dragon Adventures 1 – Dragon Slippers

Jessica Day George's Dragon Slippers is a dragon story for 10 year olds told by a girl whose own family decided to give her away.

What happens

Creel tells it herself, and she's very funny about how she ended up on that hillside. Her parents are dead. The farm has been sold. Her aunt has worked out that if Creel is left outside a dragon's cave, a brave knight will rescue her, marry her, and take the whole family off to live in his castle.

Creel thinks this is nonsense. She says so. Nobody listens.

So up the hill she goes. Her aunt promises the boys a penny sweet each if they throw rocks at the cave mouth to wake the thing up, then walks safely back down the path.

The dragon comes out. It's brown and scaly and impossibly old, with a great rack of golden horns, and it has absolutely no interest in her.

"And what am I supposed to do with you?"

That's the joke the whole opening runs on. Creel has been raised on stories where dragons want maidens and knights want dragons. This dragon is tired, bored and thoroughly fed up with the trouble humans cause.

Creel has her own plan anyway, and it never involved a knight. She has her mother's skill with a needle, no dowry at all and an idea about a dress shop in a proper city. So she starts bargaining.

Reading it is a pleasure mostly because of her voice. She's dry and stubborn and she notices things. Her aunt is "dumber than two turnips in a rain barrel". The dragon reminds her of the local tailor, who pretends he can't stand his own eight children and secretly dotes on every one of them.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Creel is a teenager, not a ten year old, and the sentences are longer than most books at this age. Her parents died of a fever before the story starts. And when she's left at the cave she recites the line her aunt taught her, "I am a virgin, pure and true", with nobody explaining what it means.

None of that is graphic. There's no violence in the opening beyond a ball of fire burning some grass. But if your reader is at the younger end of ten, read the first chapter alongside them and see how it sits.

What to read next

If they finish it and want more, Dragon Flight picks Creel up back at her needle and thoroughly bored, until word arrives that a neighbouring country has been breeding dragons.