How to Train Your Dragon

How to Train Your Dragon by Cressida Cowell is a laugh-out-loud Viking story for 9 year olds about a boy who has to catch a dragon, then work out how on earth to train it.

What happens

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third is the son of the Chief of the Hairy Hooligans. He's also small, freckled and so ordinary you'd walk straight past him. The other boys call him Hiccup the Useless (to his face).

To join the Tribe, Hiccup and nine other boys must climb a cliff, creep into a cave of three thousand sleeping dragons and steal one each. Come back without one and you're out of the Tribe for good. What could possibly go wrong?

Quite a lot, as it happens! Hiccup's best friend Fishlegs is allergic to reptiles. He sneezes. Four times.

Hiccup does come home with a dragon. It's tiny, and when it yawns there isn't a single tooth in its mouth, which Snotlout finds hilarious. So that's its name sorted. Toothless.

Then comes the training. Gobber the Belch says it's all explained in a book in the Great Hall. When Hiccup finds it, there's one page, and the method is basically yelling. Hiccup is hopeless at yelling. But he has a secret. He's spent years watching dragons, and he can talk to them in Dragonese.

It's very, VERY funny. Everyone shouts in capitals, Gobber has a beard like exploding fireworks and the punishment for nearly everything is three weeks of limpets. The narrator chats to your reader as if they're in on the joke, and there are dragon fact files with a FEAR FACTOR score for each breed.

Underneath the jokes, Hiccup is a really lovely hero. He's scared, and he goes into the cave anyway. When Fishlegs is left with no dragon, Hiccup hands over his own and heads back into the tunnel with the whole cave on their heels. Who wouldn't want a friend like that?

It's worth knowing there's a fair bit of rough and tumble, all played for laughs. The bullies grind Hiccup's face into the snow, a dragon bites his leg and Gobber kills one of the attacking dragons with his axe. If your reader enjoys a bit of cartoon peril, they'll love every page. And far out at sea, something enormous is starting to wake up...

What to read next

If they've loved the jokes and a storyteller who talks straight to them, Cressida Cowell also wrote The Wizards of Once. It's set in a wild, dark forest, where a boy Wizard who should know better lays a trap to catch a Witch.