The Dragons of Blueland

The Dragons of Blueland by Ruth Stiles Gannett is a short, gentle rescue story for 7 year olds, and it rounds off the three books about Elmer Elevator and his dragon.

What happens

Boris is flying home at last. Six sisters, seven brothers, one gigantic mother and father, all of them up in the mountains of Blueland in the middle of Awful Desert.

The trouble starts long before he gets there. He is the size of a buffalo now, striped blue and yellow with gold wings, and he needs somewhere to sleep in the daylight where nobody will spot him. Most of the culverts under the road are far too small. The one he does squeeze into sits right beside a farm.

Mr Wagonwheel sees something blue gallop past his window at five in the morning and sets off after the Blue Demon with a rifle and a rope. He is thwarted mainly by insisting on very hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, and by a field of cows who quietly stand in front of the culvert pretending to drink.

That sets the tone for the rest of it. The grown-ups are loud and useless, the animals are sensible, and the dragon is unfailingly polite to everyone.

Then Boris reaches Blueland and finds men camped on the mountainside with an enormous net, his entire family shut in a cave with one guarded entrance, and talk of every zoo in the country wanting one.

It is short enough to finish in two or three sittings and it is built to be read aloud. The sentences are plain, the jokes live in the details (Mrs Wagonwheel, too rattled to think, slipping a pancake into her apron pocket instead of her handkerchief and a spoonful of salt into her coffee), and each chapter is one small problem solved with whatever is to hand.

A child who has just started on chapter books can manage this alone. There is no frightening peril, no fighting and nobody is hurt. The worst moment is Boris getting stuck in a tunnel and crying about it, and even that is over quickly.

One note on the vintage. It was written in 1951 and it sounds like it. People say "Drat it", and the farmer's wife goes to bed with a case of nerves while her husband roars at her about the eggs. Most 7 year olds find that funny rather than strange.

What to read next

If you are meeting this family for the first time, start at the beginning instead. My Father's Dragon sends a boy called Elmer Elevator stowing away to Wild Island to rescue a young dragon from the animals using him as a ferry.