How to Twist a Dragon’s Tale

Cressida Cowell's How to Twist a Dragon's Tale is a very funny Viking adventure for 9 year olds, told by a hero looking back on the summer he was eleven.

What happens

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third is the son of the Chief of Berk. He is also small, red-haired and completely unconvincing as a Viking. His best friend Fishlegs has asthma, eczema, flat feet and an allergy to reptiles, which is unlucky in a dragon-riding school.

Hiccup's hunting dragon Toothless is about the size of a naughty dachshund. He stammers, he interrupts, and he would very much like to eat a reindeer.

It is August and horribly hot, which never happens on Berk. Hiccup's grandfather keeps announcing that the heat is an Omen of Doom and that something new and terrible has woken up in the West. Nobody takes Old Wrinkly seriously. He isn't very good at looking into the future.

Then a herding lesson goes spectacularly wrong. Toothless hits a herd of 360 reindeer like a cue ball and scatters them across the island. Afterwards Hiccup notices a whole hillside burnt to sooty stubble, with a greenish tinge in the ash. His teacher says summer lightning. Hiccup knows better and gets told to get back in line.

What comes out of that, in the older Hiccup's words, is the Quest to Stop the Volcano from Exploding.

The fun of these books is the telling. Hiccup narrates his own childhood as if it happened to somebody else, so you get the adventure and a dry commentary on how hopeless he was at the time.

Toothless gets the best lines. He promises to stay very calm, crosses his claws, licks Hiccup on the nose and then charges anyway. Your reader will see it coming several pages before Hiccup does, which is most of the pleasure.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Snotlout and the other boys call Hiccup useless to his face, over and over. And the scruffy riding dragon Hiccup picks has old manacle marks on his legs, with the man in charge of the stables suggesting it would be kindest to bonk him on the head and have done with it. A child who feels things keenly on behalf of animals might want a word about that bit. If you've got a reader who already backs the underdog, they'll adore him.

This one sits a fair way into Hiccup's memoirs, after How to Train Your Dragon and a few more besides, though the shouting and the sarcasm carry you along from the first page.

What to read next

If the Viking jokes go down well, Cowell is just as funny about wizards in The Wizards of Once. Xar is another boy in permanent trouble, with a crowd of animals and sprites who follow him about and land him in more of it.