Elmer and the Dragon

Elmer and the Dragon is a flying adventure for 7 year olds that starts in mid-air, with a boy and a baby dragon leaving an island behind them forever.

What happens

Elmer Elevator is nine. He has just got the dragon away from the animals who were keeping him prisoner, and now the dragon wants to say thank you by flying him home.

There are two problems with this plan. Neither of them knows where home is. And the dragon has never flown that far in his life.

They stop on Tangerina to work it out. Elmer eats the insides of nineteen tangerines and the dragon eats the peel, which he loves. A very old seagull points a wing west northwest and says it is a long way. Elmer packs sixty-nine tangerines, a jackknife, some rubber bands, three sticks of gum and seven pink lollipops, which are strictly for emergencies.

Then the storm hits.

This is the part your reader will remember. The dragon's wings get heavy. The wind pushes them backwards. He tells Elmer he cannot go on, and he apologises for not keeping his promise, and they both cry a bit before landing in the dark on what turns out to be a sandbank in the middle of nowhere. In the morning the dragon is too stiff to move and cannot even turn his head to see the island Elmer is pointing at. Elmer bends his legs for him one at a time until he can walk.

It is only a page or two and it ends well, but a very sensitive 7 year old may need a hand held through it. An emergency lollipop helps.

After that it is pure joy. The island turns out to be where every escaped pet canary in the world lives, and the whole population is ill with curiosity, because their king has been sitting on a family secret for eleven generations and will not say what it is.

This one is a sequel, though it catches you up on how Elmer and the dragon met in its own first paragraph, so it works on its own.

The short chapters and the daft precision, always an exact number of tangerines, make it lovely to read aloud.

What to read next

If they want the beginning, My Father's Dragon is where a boy meets a drippy old alley cat in the rain and hears about an island worth running away to.